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Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance navigation at night
Every spring, Bogong moths use the starry night sky as a compass to navigate up to 1,000 km towards their alpine migratory goal.
To test whether Bogong moths fly in their inherited migratory directions under natural night skies, two transparent ultraviolet (UV)-transmissive non-magnetic cylindrical flight simulator arenas were placed on an open hilltop ( Methods and Extended Data Fig. Two ferromagnetic-free Mouritsen–Frost flight simulators (of the same type used in the laboratory) were placed on a hilltop at Glenhare and used to record the heading directions of tethered migratory Bogong moths experiencing the full local surrounding landscape and the entire dome of the natural sky. The probe of a spectrometer (Ocean Optics QE65 PRO, see Methods), equipped with a collimating lens (25° field of view), was positioned at the same location as the moth and systematically pointed at the projected sky in different directions (0–360° in 30° steps) relative to geographic North.
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