Sociedad de Biología de Chile > Noticias > Incredible journeys: How a small Australian moth harnesses the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field to make a long journey to a place it has never been before
Incredible journeys: How a small Australian moth harnesses the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field to make a long journey to a place it has never been before
Dear fellow biologists,
We are happy to invite you to the eighth centenary lecture of IUBS:
Tuesday, 30th of September 2025, 15:00 – 16:30 (CET) Incredible journeys: How a small Australian moth harnesses the stars
and the Earth’s magnetic field to make a long journey
to a place it has never been before
Each spring, billions of Bogong moths escape hot conditions in different regions of southeast Australia by migrating over 1000 km to a limited number of cool caves in the Australian Alps, historically used for aestivating over the summer – a place they have never previously been. At the beginning of autumn the same individuals make a return migration to their breeding grounds to reproduce and die.
To make these incredible journeys, we have discovered that Bogong moths rely on the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field as compasses to fly in their inherited migratory direction, and a unique odour wafting from the cave that identifies the destination and provides a navigational beacon at the very end of their long journey. In my talk I will describe the experiments that led to these findings, and explain how a suite of sensory cues allow Bogong moths to make a long and perilous journey to a distant destination, despite having a tiny brain and nervous system.
Eric Warrant is Professor of Zoology, head of the Division of Sensory Biology and Head of the Lund Vision Group at the Department of Biology at the University of Lund in Sweden. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia.
Warrant obtained a degree in Physics from the University of New South Wales and a PhD in Visual Science from the Australian National University before heading to Lund for a postdoc, where he has stayed ever since. Warrant leads an active research group studying vision and visual navigation in animals from extremely dim habitats (nocturnal and deep sea). Using electrophysiological, optical, histological, behavioural and theoretical approaches, Warrant studies how animals as diverse as nocturnal insects, deep-sea cephalopods and fast-swimming predatory fishes are able to see well at very low light levels, and his research has led to the discovery of neural principles that permit vision in dim light. In recent years Warrant’s group has turned its attention to the sensory basis of long-distance migration in the Australian Bogong moth, particularly the role of the Earth’s magnetic field and the stars in migratory navigation. Warrant is a past-President of the International Society of Neuroethology, a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation and Fellow and President of the Royal Physiographic Society. He also sits on the Senior Editorial Boards of the Journal of Comparative Physiology A and Austral Entomology and is also on the Academic Advisory Board of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
