From the current edition of spaceweather.com:
MOTHS FOLLOW THE MILKY WAY: Astronomers come in all shapes and sizes--even invertebrates. A new study published in Nature reveals that Australian moths can see and decipher the night sky. They pay particular attention to the Milky Way and seem capable of navigating using the Carina nebula as a visual landmark.
Every spring in southeast Australia, billions of Bogong moths take flight under cover of darkness. It's the beginning of an epic migration as much as 1,000 kilometers long. Their destination: a small cluster of caves in the Australian Alps--places the moths have never visited before, yet somehow navigate to with remarkable precision. Their compass, it turns out, is the night sky itself.
Reaching this conclusion required the researchers to do something you probably don't want to think about too closely: They attached the moths to tiny little tethers. Moths could lift off and pick a direction, but not escape. special moth planetarium (pictured right). Star patterns were projected onto an overhead screen, while the ambient magnetic field was nulled by Helmholtz coils, guaranteeing that the participants could not "cheat" using magnetic navigation. When shown a normal star field, the moths oriented in the correct direction. But when the stars were scrambled into random patterns, they lost their bearings.
To dig deeper, the researchers recorded activity from visual neurons in the moths' brains as a projected night sky rotated overhead. Neurons fired most strongly when the stars aligned with the moth's inherited migratory heading. Some neurons were tuned to the brightest region of the Milky Way (especially near the Carina nebula) suggesting that this band of starlight is a visual landmark.
Clouds produced the next revelation: Bogong moths remained oriented even when stars were hidden. In those cases, they relied on Earth’s magnetic field instead, revealing a dual-compass system similar to that of migratory birds. When both stellar and magnetic cues were removed, the moths became disoriented again.
As a retired air navigator in the USAF, I am a dinosaur today. I flew the nav seat in large military aircraft and was capable of worldwide navigation all over the globe using celestial navigation. Of course I had modern star maps and an accurate time piece, with a sextant, uaing manual calculations on a paper form. No GPS at the time of course. An amateur astronomer since my early youth, I knew very well how to identify all of the standard navigation starrs taught to use in AF navigator's training. The same must be true in moth DNA.
