Millions of moths and small birds migrate each year, thousands of kilometers between their summer and wintering areas. Now new research shows that these completely different animal groups have surprisingly similar migration speed. The butterflies take greater risks than the birds and uses tailwind to a greater extent (which is risky but profitable) while the birds rely more on self-powered flight and therefore do not always receive as much help from the wind. The researchers show that moths and birds have developed quite different behaviors for solving the same problem. The article is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, entitled "
Convergent Patterns of Long-Distance Nocturnal Migration in Noctuid Mother and Passerine Birds" by Thomas Alerstam, Jason W. Chapman, Johan Bäckman, Alan D. Smith, Håkan Karlsson, Cecilia Nelson, Don R. Reynolds, Raymond HG Klaassen, and Jane K. Hill.
Through a more than an hour long telephone interview from New York, the nano-zooplankton project within CanMove has been put in the spotlight of the popular science journal OnEarth Magazine. Check out the link: http://www.onearth.org/article/shine-a-little-light if you want a popular (populistic?) presentation of the massive migratory patterns of small crustacean animals in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Or read journalist Alan Burdick's blogpost on the same topic: http://www.aburdick.com/silvarerum/2011/03/04/chasing-daphnia-the-smallest-story-on-earth/
