Orientation at Night by High-Flying Insects

The substance of this paper deals with one striking feature of insect migration — common orientation at night by larger-sized (30–2000 mg), high-flying insects. This phenomenon was unsuspected before it was made dramatically obvious by the fortuitous sensitivity of simple scanning radars to non-random orientation in populations of airborne insects (Schaefer 1969). Since then, common orientation has been widely observed in many radar studies (J. Roffey, personal communication 1972; Riley 1975; Schaefer 1976; Reid et al. 1979; Riley and Reynolds 1979,1983; W.W. Wolf, personal communication 1980; Greenbank et al. 1980; Drake et al. 1981; Drake 1983, 1984) and it appears to be a very common feature of nocturnal migratory flight. All authors agree that orientation occurs in both the presence and absence of moonlight.

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