Latest news with #bogongmoth
RNZ News
02-07-2025
- Science
- RNZ News
Science: Commentator Laurie Winkless
Photo: Science commentator Laurie Winkless joins Kathryn to talk about how the Earth is trapping more heat in the atmosphere and what happens when its energy balance is out of alignment. Chemotherapy has saved countless lives, but it can be unpleasant, and up to 20 percent of people don't respond to the drugs. Now a genomic test has been developed to see which patients might experience a bad reaction to the most commonly-used chemo drugs. And Australia's bogong moth makes an epic journey south each year - now scientists have found they use stars to navigate. Laurie Winkless is a physicist and science writer
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
These moths use stars to navigate, just like humans
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. We've long known that some animals depend on the Sun to navigate the world. However, new research may have uncovered the first insect we know of that does the same using the stars and night sky. The stars have long been a navigational tool for humans. For instance, think of the North Star. However, we've never discovered any insects that use them the same way we do. At least not before the bogong moth. According to new research published this year, these moths actually rely on the stars the same way that humans do. Each spring, these moths travel more than 600 miles using the stars as their guide. The journey is an important one for the moths, which rely on the cool climate of the Australian Alps to keep them safe from the obtrusive summer heat. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 The thing about bogong moths is that these insects have never traveled to the mountains before they make their yearly migration. This isn't a path that they take every year of their lives. Many of these insects only live a matter of days or weeks. So, there had to be some way for them to get where they were meant to be. The only answer researchers could reach was stellar navigation. As I noted above, this form of navigation has been a mainstay in human travels for centuries. It's one of the primary ways that sailors used to navigate the high seas, and without any kind of land to mark the horizon, being able to tell which way you were traveling just from looking up was extremely important. And in the Australian outback, where the bogong moths live, one of the most prominent landmarks is the Milky Way. So, it makes sense that these insects might rely on such a prominent figure in the sky to get them around the world. But a theory can only go so far. To truly test it, researchers had to capture some of the insects and put them through some tests. To test that they actually rely on the stars and not Earth's magnetic field, the researchers did everything they could to negate the force of Earth's magnetic field. This allowed them to see that bogong moths do indeed rely on the stars in the night sky to see where they're going. The researchers hope that by learning more about how these insects get around, it could help with conservation efforts in the future. For now, knowing that some animals and insects rely on the stars can help us look deeper into the animal kingdom for others that do the same. It can also help us better understand how light pollution, which continues to get worse, might affect these creatures. More Top Deals Amazon gift card deals, offers & coupons 2025: Get $2,000+ free See the
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Australia's sky could change forever after winter ends
When Aussies look up into the sky at the end of winter, there will be a noticeable difference from what we saw a decade ago. Bogong moths used to migrate across Victoria, NSW, Queensland and South Australia in their billions, reportedly blocking out the moon, but in 2017 and 2018 their numbers crashed by 99.5 per cent. Mortein once advertised its sprays could be used to kill bogong moths, but that advice was eventually removed after the species was listed as endangered in 2021. While the moths have been in steady decline since the 1980s, it was the sudden drop in numbers during the Millennium Drought that caused the average punter to take notice. The situation has a leading conservation biologist 'extremely worried' both about the moth and the animals that depend on it as a food source, like the critically endangered mountain pygmy possum. Dr Marissa Parrott from Zoos Victoria said it's accurate to say 'within a generation, Australia has changed' as invertebrates vanish from the landscape. 'In Australia, with animals like the bogong moth, it becomes apparent things can go wrong very quickly,' she told Yahoo News. For thousands of years, bongog moths have meant spring was here, and Christmas beetles were a sign of summer. These insects are wound up in memories from our childhoods, but today both are seldom seen. '[Insect] numbers are all declining across time. But then you get those big events like a major drought, flood or bushfires and they can wipe out entire species,' Dr Parrott said. 'We're seeing that every day, that these animals are struggling, and we've probably lost far more invertebrates than we could ever even imagine… and it's only getting worse. We really need to change.' Parrott notes the problem is a global one, with many referring to it as an 'intertebrate apocalypse'. Often, people don't realise the insects are gone until their crops stop being pollinated or the birds that eat insects suddenly vanish. When it comes to bogong moths, the good news is that since 2018, there has been a trend towards recovery. But the species' future is far from secure. Zoos Victoria's Moth Tracker project, an online platform where people around the country can report bogong moth sightings, was launched in 2019, and last year was its best season on record. Between September and December, there were 1,956 sightings, and 1,089 were verified by the expert team. Some swarms (groups of over 100 moths) were even observed in 2024, something that hadn't been seen in years. "It was wonderful to see that again, but they're only one more drought from those numbers dropping right back low again. We need to have a long-term plan to protect and recover them," Parrott said. Related: 🚨 Call to protect Australia's changing insect landscape A bogong moth will live for around a year, with each dying after the autumn breeding season. The caterpillars live underground throughout the winter and then migrate up to 1,000km across Australia to alpine regions in the warmer months. Those that survive the feeding frenzy from native animals fly back across the country to their breeding ground to lay their own eggs. 'Each female can lay up to 2,000 eggs, so their numbers could bounce back quite quickly if we can protect them,' Parrott said. 🌏 'Shocking' jellyfish find could change the way Aussies visit the beach 🔍 Rare find inside ancient cave after tourists banned for years 🏡 Key detail caught on front yard security footage sparks alarm Earlier this week, a new study published in the journal Nature revealed bogong moths used constellations of stars and the Milky Way to navigate their migration routes. This upended a belief that moths simply flew towards the brightest light in the sky. The team from Lund University, the Australian National University (ANU), and the University of South Australia compared their abilities to those of migratory birds. Insects like bogong moths face multiple threats, including pesticides for agriculture, deforestation, climate change and light pollution. A 2017 study of select conservation areas in Germany found the insect biomass had dropped by 75 per cent in 27 years. Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? 🐊🦘😳 Get our new newsletter showcasing the week's best stories.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Tiny Moth Seen Navigating by The Stars in Scientific First
Every year, the bogong moth makes an epic journey across Australia. When the warmer days of spring spread across the country, billions of bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) up stakes and fly, unerringly and only at night, up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) to a place they have never been before: the cool caves high in the Australian Alps. There, they will enter a state of dormancy – called aestivation – to wait out the hot summer before dispersing again to breed in autumn, creating the next generation of moths to find their way to the summer caves. Exactly how they accomplish this feat has long fascinated scientists: the lifespan of the bogong is just one year, so the route must be hardwired in somehow. Now, a piece of the puzzle has been found. They follow the stars. "In our study," neuroscientist Andrea Adden of the Francis Crick Institute in the UK told ScienceAlert, "we show that bogong moths can use the starry sky (without any additional cues) to fly in that migratory direction, which tells us that they can use it to navigate: fly in the correct direction stably over many kilometers to a specific migratory goal." The flight of the bogong moths is an amazing thing to experience. They fly for hours through the night, stopping to rest during the day in any crannies and crevices they can access. It's not unheard of for a town to be blanketed with napping bogongs on their way to the Australian Alps; the entire migration can take many nights. To navigate long distances, animals rely on a variety of signs and stimuli. Some may use special adaptations to sense the magnetic field that encompasses the planet. Others may use visual cues, such as following the Moon, the Sun, or landmarks. Previous research led by zoologist David Dreyer and senior author Eric Warrant of Lund University showed that bogong moths use a combination of both magnetoreception and visual cues. It now appears magnetism might not play as big a role as thought. To build on these earlier findings, Dreyer, Adden, Warrant and their colleagues have now conducted a series of experiments to find out what the visual cues in question might be. Using a Helmholtz coil system, which nullifies Earth's magnetic field, they projected different starry vistas onto the vacuum chamber, and observed that the moths still flew in a seasonally appropriate direction. They also showed moths different images of the night sky while Adden recorded their brain activity using single-cell electrophysiology. "A very thin glass electrode (thinner than a human hair) is inserted into specific brain regions of a moth to penetrate the cell-membrane of certain navigation relevant neurons. The signal or electric activity of such a neuron is now amplified and recorded for subsequent analysis," Dreyer explained. "While the cell was impaled, the moth was stimulated with rotations of a projected image of the starry sky and various controls. It turns out that about 28 of the recorded neurons responded to changes of the orientation of the starry sky, not the control image (image in which a randomized arrangement of the starry sky was presented)." That rotation is important, and to understand why, we have to consider another animal that uses the stars as a guide: the dung beetle. Previous research has shown that dung beetles use a mental stellar map to return home after rolling a ball away from the dung heap. But their journey is quite different from the one bogong moths undertake. "Dung beetles don't care where they end up with their dung ball, they roll their ball in a random direction away from competitors on the dung heap," Adden explained. "Also, dung beetles only need to get far enough from the dung heap to eat their meal in peace, a distance they travel in about 10 minutes." The journey of a bogong moth is much longer, taking up to several weeks, for hours at a time, with much higher stakes: if the moth doesn't make it to that cave in time for summer, it's not going to survive into the next breeding season. "It needs to compensate for crosswinds and most importantly, if the bogongs predominantly use their sky compass, they would need to compensate for the celestial rotation over the course of a respective night," Dreyer said. "This means that if bogong moths fly at an angle relative to a particular cue in the sky (for example, the Carina Nebula or the long axis of the Milky Way), this angle would need to change accordingly through steering to keep a straight line of flight." We don't know exactly what stellar properties the moths are basing their navigation on, but the team's research clearly shows that, in the absence of a magnetic field, and under a starry sky, they are still able to find their way. "During our research, we've had two main questions. Firstly, how does the Bogong moth know the direction it needs to travel? And secondly, how does it know when to stop?" Warrant told ScienceAlert. "We are starting to work on the second question now, to determine the sensory cues that might be associated with the destination – this is our next line of research. But another obvious area of future research is to try and understand how magnetic and stellar information is integrated in the brain." Celestial navigation is pretty common in the animal kingdom. Humans do it, some birds can do it, and some seals and frogs. Other moths and butterflies use the Sun to navigate. So it's unlikely that the bogong moth is the only insect that can navigate at night in this way. That, however, does not make it any less of a wonder. "That a tiny insect with a wingspan of 5 cm and a brain the tenth of the volume of a grain of rice manages to fly about 1000 km at nighttime, potentially just by using the stars to steer the course still amazes me," Dreyer said "Imagine someone gives you the task to walk such a distance without food or shelter, exclusively at nighttime without GPS or a compass. If one makes just a small, let's say five-degree, mistake while determining the walking direction on the first night, that means you are already 90 kilometers off target after 1000 kilometers, and if you have to walk on multiple nights, there is plenty of time for steering mistakes. The story doesn't get old." The research has been published in Nature. 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Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Bogong moths appear to use stars to navigate 600-mile journey, a first for insects
Each spring, billions of bogong moths fill southeast Australia's skies. Fleeing the lowlands and trying to beat the heat, they fly roughly 600 miles to caves embedded in the Australian Alps. The moths emerge from their larval stage with the tools to make this journey, but no one knows how the 1-inch-long moths navigate their way to the caves. Scientists previously found that the moths could sense Earth's magnetic field with an internal compass. And now, they say they've cracked the rest of the mystery. In a study published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday, researchers found the bogong moths use the starry sky as a guide to the caves. 'The big thing that we've discovered here is a very, very tiny animal like a moth, with a very small nervous system, a very small brain, very small eyes is able to interpret the starry night sky and work out a direction to fly in,' said Eric Warrant, a professor of zoology at Lund University in Sweden, who is an author of the new research. Several bird species, in addition to humans, have demonstrated they can use the stars to navigate great distances. And while dung beetles use the light of stars to travel a few dozen feet, no insect had been documented using stellar navigation to travel. 'The bogong moth, as far as we know, is the first one that has been described to navigate using the stars,' said Andrea Adden, a postdoctoral researcher who studies at The Francis Crick Institute in London and contributed to the research. The researchers discovered the moths' stellar navigation ability by capturing wild bogong moths and then suspending the animals on a thin tungsten rod inside in a small, barrel-shaped 'flight simulator.' With their backs glued to the rod, the animals could flap their wings inside the simulator and turn as if they were flying naturally. 'It can rotate freely,' said David Dreyer, a Lund University researcher who is another author of the study. 'It can choose any direction it wants to fly to.' The researchers created a magnetic vacuum to disable the creatures' internal magnetic compass and focus on its other senses. At the top of the flight simulator, researchers projected an image of the night sky, which could be adjusted as they pleased. During testing, the researchers adjusted the rotation of the sky and found that the moths shifted their flying patterns to compensate and set a new heading. But when the researchers projected a randomized, broken-up sky pattern into the flight simulator, the animals got lost. 'The animals were totally disoriented,' Dreyer said. 'That was, for us, like the final proof, more or less, that they actually indeed use the stars for navigation.' In separate experiments, the researchers cut a tiny window into the moths' brains, inserted a glass tube inside a neuron and measured electrical impulses as the star projection was displayed. The researchers found that electrical impulses spiked when specific angles of the sky were shown. The animals did not react strongly when the researchers projected a randomized sky pattern. Warrant said bogong moth eyes have small pupils and they are likely only capable of seeing a handful of the brightest stars in the sky. The researchers suspect the animals might use the Milky Way to navigate. 'They probably see the Milky Way much more distinctly and brightly than we do,' Warrant said. Warrant said the moths likely use their sense of smell on their final approach to the alpine caves. 'They detect a compound most likely that's coming out of the cave — an odor compound which acts as a kind of an olfactory beacon that guides them into the cave,' he said, adding that the smell is similar to that of rotting meat. The moths, which live for about a year, spend a dormant summer in the caves and then return home to where they emerged. Ken Lohmann, a professor in the biology department at the University of North Carolina who was not involved in the research, said it was convincing work and that the experiments were thoughtful and well controlled. 'One of the things that is really remarkable about it is just the way the moths appear to be able to maintain this heading over a long period of time and over tremendous distances using a relatively small brain,' said Lohmann, who studies animal navigation. 'It just highlights the ingenuity of natural selection.' Bogong moths are endangered and were added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's 'red list' in 2021. The authors said the new findings could help stem the decline of the species. 'The moth population has been decreasing dramatically in numbers over recent years, especially with the drought and the bushfires that Australia had in 2020,' Adden said. 'Knowing that they use vision as one part of the sensory arsenal that they use to guide their navigation may inform protection approaches with respect to light pollution, for example, when the moths get trapped in cities, for example.' This article was originally published on
