New York (AP) – Australian mission that follows stars Annual immigrationUsing Night sky As a guiding link, according to a new study.
When the temperatures are heated, the night Bogong mites fly about 620 miles (1000 km) to cool in the caves by the Australian Alps. They later return to the house to reproduce and die.
Birds routinely move by Starlight, but mites are the first known invertebrates, or creatures without the spine, to find their way through this Long distances Using stars.
Scientists have long wondered how Travel To an unprecedented place. I glimpse a previous study that Earth magnetic field It may help direct them in the right direction, along with a type of visual monument as a guide.
Since the stars appear in predictable patterns every night, scientists suspect that they may help driving the road. They put a mission in the flight simulator that mimics the night sky over it and banned the Earth’s magnetic field, referring to the place where they flew. Then they rushed to the stars and saw how the mites reaction was.
When the stars were as it should, the mites flutter in the right direction. But when the stars were in random places, the mites were confused. Their brain cells are also enthusiastic in response to specific orientations of the night sky.
The results were published on Wednesday in Nature.
“It was a very clean and impressive demonstration that the mites really use a scene of the night sky to direct their movements,” said Kenneth Lahman, who studies animal navigation at North Carolina University in Chapel Hill and did not participate in the new research.
Researchers do not know what the night sky features are used by mites to find their way. It can be a tape of light from the Milky Way, a colored nebula or anything else. Whatever it is, it appears that insects depend on this alongside the Earth’s magnetic field to take their journey.
Other animals make fun of the stars as evidence. Birds take heavenly signals as they rise in the sky, and the beetles explode short distances while using the Milky Way to stay on their path.
The author of the study, David Dieryer of the University of Lund in Sweden, said that it is an impressive achievement of Bugong’s mites, whose brains are smaller than the size of the rice to rely on the night sky for their Odysse.
“It is striking that an animal with a small brain can do it already,” Drair said.
___
The Ministry of Health and Science at Associated Press receives support from the Houard Hughes Institute. AP is the only responsible for all content.
