Hosted by the Evolution of Brains and Behaviour (EBaB) lab (School of Biological Sciences) 

Many animals are well known for their spectacular migrations across the surface of the earth. Remarkably, they can migrate over thousands of kilometers to reach a highly specific location at the end of their journey. One prime example is the annual migration of Monarch butterflies. Each fall, millions of these colorful butterflies migrate over more than 5.000 km from North America and Canada to their overwintering habitat in the mountain ranges of Central Mexico. In my group, we are interested in understanding how these insects master such a remarkable migration in spite of exhibiting a brain that is smaller than a grain of rice. We are studying the compass of Monarch butterflies through behavioral and neuroanatomical techniques, as well as through electrophysiological approaches, such as multichannel tetrode recordings from tethered-flying butterflies. Our recent results suggest that the Monarch butterfly compass relies on ultimodal information for orientation that changes its coding in a locomotor-dependent manner. Moreover, we discovered that the Monarch brain houses goal-direction neurons, similar to the ones described in the mammalian brain. Taken together, Monarch butterflies represent the optimal model organism to shed light on the fundamental principles of animal navigation – from the neural principles to the behavioral mechanisms.