Butterfly Brain

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Given the highly conserved function of the insect central complex 1, 36, 37, 38, this brain region is central for spatial orientation in monarch butterflies. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives.

Laura is a judge on the Blue Peter Awards 2018: “I adored judging the Blue Peter Book Award, the nominated list was incredibly strong and made judging the prize so difficult. Laura Dockrill is a performance poet and novelist whose inventive and vibrant approach to life is reflected in the vividly imagined worlds she creates. This little butterfly is going to help Gus recapture all he has lost, including the memories of his mum that he has hidden deep inside himself for years. By changing the compass polarity through sun displacements, we might have induced a translocation of the HD representation Gus must follow the butterfly to recapture all he’s lost, including that locked box he doesn’t seem to want to touch … Together they remember fish fingers, snapping bubble wrap, cracked pink soap and the leaky tap; they go wild, stomping around in the joy of imagination and happy dreams – but they can’t go any further if Gus won’t gather all of his memories.Box plots indicate median (middle line), 25th, 75th percentile (box) and 5th and 95th percentile (whiskers). The angular tuning of GD neurons was expected to change only in response to aversive conditioning, while the angular tuning of HD neurons should change only during compass perturbation. Cureus is not responsible for the scientific accuracy or reliability of data or conclusions published herein. A robust representation of the goal direction, however, is of highest ecological importance for migratory insects such as monarch butterflies that seasonally migrate up to 5.

Our results fit well with the suggested synaptic connection between GD and steering neurons 43, 44, 46. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.S9b), than what would be expected from a negative phototactic behavior in monarch butterflies 48, suggesting that their orientation strategy remained a menotactic behavior. Although insect GD neurons have been predicted in several theoretical studies 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 it is still not fully clear how the goal direction is encoded in insects.