Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance navigation at night
Each spring, billions of Bogong moths escape hot conditions across southeast Australia by migrating up to 1,000 km to a place that they have never previously visited-a limited number of cool caves in the Australian Alps, historically used for aestivating over summer<sup>1,2</sup>. At the beginning of autumn, the same individuals make a return migration to their breeding grounds to reproduce and die. Here we show that Bogong moths use the starry night sky as a compass to distinguish between specific geographical directions, thereby navigating in their inherited migratory direction towards their distant goal. By tethering spring and autumn migratory moths in a flight simulator<sup>3-5</sup>, we found that, under naturalistic moonless night skies and in a nulled geomagnetic field (disabling the moth's known magnetic sense<sup>4</sup>), moths flew in their seasonally appropriate migratory directions. Visual interneurons in different regions of the moth's brain responded specifically to rotations of the night sky and were tuned to a common sky orientation, firing maximally when the moth was headed southwards. Our results suggest that Bogong moths use stellar cues and the Earth's magnetic field to create a robust compass system for long-distance nocturnal navigation towards a specific destination.
Authors
- James J. Foster (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4444-2375)
- Ken Green (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7697-8377)
- Eric J. Warrant (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7480-7016)
- Mary Whitehouse (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9911-8356)
- Jingjing Xu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0311-5711)
- Andrea Adden (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6455-6313)
- Henrik Mouritsen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7082-4839)
- David L. Dreyer (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4344-8596)
- Stanley Heinze (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8145-3348)
- Gao Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1000-5687)
- Jesse Rudolf Amenuvegbe Wallace (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3286-9427)
- Javaan Chahl (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6496-0543)
- Hui Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9146-7743)
- Barrie J. Frost
Institutions
- Australian National University (AU)
- Nanjing Agricultural University (CN)
- Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (DE)
- University of South Australia (AU)
- University of Southern Denmark (DK)
- Lund University (SE)
- University of Konstanz (DE)
- Queen's University (CA)
- The Francis Crick Institute (GB)
- National Computational Infrastructure (AU)
- Australian National Wildlife Collection (AU)
- Macquarie University (AU)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature
- Published
- 2025-06-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09135-3
- Citations
- 32
- Primary Topic
- Neurobiology and Insect Physiology Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 29.09