博贡蛾使用恒星指南针在夜间进行远距离导航，这一成果由隆德大学Eric Warrant团队经过不懈努力而取得。相关论文于2025年6月18日发表在《自然》杂志上。

在这里，研究团队展示了博贡蛾将星空作为指南针来区分特定的地理方向，从而沿着它们继承的迁徙方向导航到遥远的目标。通过将春季和秋季的候鸟飞蛾拴在飞行模拟器中，小组发现，在自然的无月夜空和没有地磁场（使飞蛾的已知磁感丧失）的情况下，飞蛾会按照季节适宜的迁徙方向飞行。蛾子大脑中不同区域的视觉中间神经元对夜空的旋转有专门的反应，并被调整到一个共同的天空方向，当蛾子向南飞行时，它们的放电最大。他们的研究结果表明，波宫蛾以恒星线索和地球磁场为主题，创造了一个机器人指南针系统，用于夜间长距离导航，到达特定的目的地。

据悉，每年春天，数以十亿计的波贡蛾为了躲避炎热的气候，迁徙到澳大利亚东南部，到一个他们以前从未去过的地方——位于阿尔卑斯山的几个凉爽的洞穴，历史上以夏季度假为主题。在秋天开始的时候，同样的个体会返回繁殖地进行繁殖和死亡。

附：英文原文

Title: Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance navigation at night

Author: Dreyer, David, Adden, Andrea, Chen, Hui, Frost, Barrie, Mouritsen, Henrik, Xu, Jingjing, Green, Ken, Whitehouse, Mary, Chahl, Javaan, Wallace, Jesse, Hu, Gao, Foster, James, Heinze, Stanley, Warrant, Eric

Issue&Volume: 2025-06-18

Abstract: Each spring, billions of Bogong moths escape hot conditions across southeast Australia by migrating up to 1,000km to a place that they have never previously visited—a limited number of cool caves in the Australian Alps, historically used for aestivating over summer1,2. At the beginning of autumn, the same individuals make a return migration to their breeding grounds to reproduce and die. Here we show that Bogong moths use the starry night sky as a compass to distinguish between specific geographical directions, thereby navigating in their inherited migratory direction towards their distant goal. By tethering spring and autumn migratory moths in a flight simulator3,4,5, we found that, under naturalistic moonless night skies and in a nulled geomagnetic field (disabling the moth’s known magnetic sense4), moths flew in their seasonally appropriate migratory directions. Visual interneurons in different regions of the moth’s brain responded specifically to rotations of the night sky and were tuned to a common sky orientation, firing maximally when the moth was headed southwards. Our results suggest that Bogong moths use stellar cues and the Earth’s magnetic field to create a robust compass system for long-distance nocturnal navigation towards a specific destination.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09135-3

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09135-3