IncredibleJourneys · Incredible journeys: How do multiple sensory cues allow animal migrants to precisely navigate to a distant goal?

Many animals, including birds, sea turtles and insects, perform spectacular long-distance migrations across the Earth. Remarkably, some of these accurately migrate between highly specific places thousands of kilometres apart, a navigational feat that is barely understood. Such precision navigation requires global compass cues to guide their long journey, and local cues at the destination to signal their arrival. I have discovered that the migratory Australian Bogong moth, with a brain size a tenth that of a rice grain, relies on the Earth’s magnetic field and the stars as global compasses, and on an odour signalling the final destination, to precisely navigate to a place it has never been before – a small alpine cave. The moth’s use of stars for long-range navigation is unique in invertebrates. But how is stellar and magnetic information sensed and integrated neurally to create precision navigation? Indeed, how do animals sense the magnetic field at all? This mystery, and its solution, is one of the greatest “holy grails” of modern sensory biology. With its simple and tractable nervous system, the Bogong moth may hold the key to solving these vexing questions. By tethering flying migratory moths in a flight simulator, and by using electrophysiology to record from sensory neurons in the brain, I will capitalise on our discoveries to make pioneering investigations of how magnetic, stellar and olfactory cues are sensed and integrated to create precise navigation. This will include aiming to identify and physiologically characterise the elusive magnetoreceptor. If I succeed, this will be a sensational discovery, opening the floodgates for international research on this little understood sense. Moreover, our recent advances in how the insect brain steers navigation will allow us to understand how sensory information is integrated to drive directed migration, opening the doors to decades of new research on the neural basis of long-distance precision navigation.