Imagine traveling to a new and distant place using only your senses to guide you.
"A new study published in Nature has found these little moths have a navigational trick up their wing—they use the stars and Earth's magnetic field to find their way."
"In a 2018 study, researchers discovered the bogong moth can sense Earth's magnetic field and use it as a guide. Now, the same team of scientists have revealed that magnetism is just part of the story."
""If you go to the Australian bush where these moths live and look around you at night, one of the most obvious visual landmarks is the Milky Way," (...).
"We know that daytime migratory insects use the sun, so testing the starry sky seemed an obvious thing to try."
To test their hypothesis, Eric and his colleagues built a special non-magnetic lab in a remote, rural location to avoid any interference from the outside world.
Inside the lab, they created simulations of the night sky and Earth's magnetic field. Their results were astonishing.
"I think the biggest surprise was discovering that bogong moths can migrate … under a projected image of the natural local starry night sky and in the total absence of Earth's magnetic field," says Eric.
When the researchers turned the artificial night sky 180 degrees, the moths flew in the opposite direction. And when the stars were randomized, the poor moths were just confused."
"It turns out the magnetic field is a backup navigational aid the moths rely on during cloudy conditions when the stars aren't visible."
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