JULY 18,
2019
A
computational simulation suggests that insects may be capable of using the
properties of light from the sky to determine their compass direction with an
error of less than two degrees. Evripidis Gkanias of the University of
Edinburgh, U.K., and colleagues present their findings in PLOS
Computational Biology.
Several insects, including honeybees,
locusts, and monarch butterflies, use the position of the sun to guide their
travel. Even when the sun is not visible, these insects can sense the
polarization of light in
the sky and use it to estimate the sun's position. However, the precise neural
processes by which insects transform properties of light from the sky into an
accurate compass sense are unclear.
To
explore this question, Gkanias and colleagues built a computational simulation
that incorporates a hypothetical system of neurons that an insect's brain could
potentially use to reconstruct the sun's position from skylight properties
detected by the eye. The simulation also incorporates known physical properties
of light from the sky, the layout of the insect eye, and other biological
parameters determined from previous research on the insect brain.
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