Navigation systems in Monarch Butterflies

It makes me wonder.....Read this with me:

“navigation” systems in automobiles are a fairly new (and still costly) innovation, monarch butterflies have managed for millennia to navigate their way for a distance of some 3000 miles (4800 kilometers) each fall from Canada to Mexico (and vice-versa in the spring) without losing their way.

The phenomenon of long-range bird migration is a well-known one, but not in the insect world. Also, among birds their migration route is a round-trip one, which they make more than once in their lifetimes, while for the monarch it is strictly a one-way trip for each butterfly. How do these creatures do it?

The mystery of the mechanisms involved in this remarkable phenomenon has been resolved by a team of scientists who did this by exploring the infinitesimal butterfly brain and eye tissues to uncover new insights into the biological machinery that directs this delicate creature on its lengthy flight path.

The research team, led by Prof. Steven Reppert of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, included Dr. Oren Froy, now of the Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Others involved were from the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Irvine. Their latest findings were published in a recent issue of Neuron magazine, constituting a continuation of their earlier work, published in the journal Science.

While light in general is essential to the functioning of the “biological clock” in the butterfly brain – governing its metabolic cycles, including its “signal” to migrate -- the researchers discovered that it is specifically the ultraviolet band of light that is crucial to the creature’s orientation. The butterflies have special photoreceptors for ultraviolet (UV) light in their eyes which provide them with their sense of direction.

They proved that this ultraviolet “navigation” is crucial by placing butterflies in a “flight” simulator. When a UV light filter was used in the simulator, the butterflies lost their orientation

Further probing revealed a key wiring connection between the light-detecting navigation sensors in the butterfly’s eye and its brain clock Thus, it was shown that input from two interconnected systems – UV light detection in the eye and the biological clock in the brain -- together guide the butterflies “straight and true” to their destination at the appointed times in their two-month migration over thousands of miles/kilometers
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I have always wondered how it is so easy for evolutionists to believe that a very exacting and complex system, one more sophisticated than we can make for ourselves, just happened to evolve in Monarch butterflies. Not just that one example, of course, but there are thousands of immensely complex and amazing systems within organisms that give those organisms amazing abilities.

Or, here's another one: Acoustic 3-D Imaging System Unveils Remarkable Behavior of Ocean Plankton

An international team of scientists from Israel, the United States and Germany, led by Prof. Amatzia Genin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, has provided, for the first time, evidence of the remarkable dynamics responsible for the formation of large aggregations of microscopic animals in the ocean.



From the surface, the ocean appears to be vast and uniform. But beneath the surface, countless numbers of tiny, nearly transparent animals, called zooplankton, are swept into clusters and patches by ocean currents. The very survival of many zooplankton predators – from invertebrates to whales – and the success of fishermen catches can depend on their success at finding those patches.



The new findings indicate that zooplankton are passively drifting with the current, as their name implies (“planktos” – “drifting” in Greek), but only in the horizontal direction, not in the vertical. Indeed, in the vertical, these creatures show a great ability to go “against the flow.”



Although scientists and fishermen have known for a long time that zooplankton spend their life suspended in a constantly flowing environment, an understanding of their responses to ocean currents has remained elusive, mainly due to technological limitations in tracking the motion of the minuscule animals.



Now, the recent development of a three-dimensional, acoustic imaging system by Jules Jaffe of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has opened the door for a team of researchers to track several hundred thousand individual zooplanktons at two coastal sites in the Red Sea. In addition to Prof. Genin, the team included his graduate student Ruth Reef; Dr. Jules Jaffe and Prof. Peter Franks from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Dr. Claudio Richter from the Center for Tropical Marine Ecology in Bremen, Germany.



Their findings, reported in the May 6 issue of the prestigious journal Science, show that these small animals effectively keep their depth by “treadmilling” against up-welling and down-welling currents at speeds of up to several tens of body-lengths per second.



Downward-flowing water in the ocean is always accompanied by horizontal flows, forming a convergence, or “down-welling” zone. When zooplankton swim upward against such a downward current, they form patches as more and more individuals are brought in with the horizontal currents and concentrated in the down-welling zone.



“Clumped distribution, termed ‘patchiness,’ is one of the most ubiquitous characteristics of oceanic zooplankton,” said Genin, lead author of the Science paper. “Aggregations (of the tiny animals) are found on all scales, from millimeters to areas covering hundreds of kilometers. Understanding the mechanisms that produce zooplankton patchiness is a central objective in biological oceanography.”



The new imaging system, Fish TV, uses multibeam sonar to uniquely measure animal movement. The system allowed the researchers to analyze the swimming behavior of more than 375,000 individual zooplankton swimming against vertical currents. Swimming in this manner allows the plankton to keep their depth, a behavior which was postulated long ago but had never been measured in the ocean until now. The scientists say it is remarkable that the small zooplanktons are capable of remaining at a constant depth with such high precision in the face of such strong vertical currents. The ecological implications of this behavior carry far-reaching consequences for predatory fishes, whales and humans.



The results of the multinational research project were captured during three experiments lasting several weeks at two sites in the Red Sea, near the coral reef of Eilat in Israel and at Ras Burka off the coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. At the sites, scuba divers attached Fish TV’s sonar head (“transducer”) on a large underwater tripod, raised some 20 feet above the sea floor. The transducer was cabled to a control and data-acquisition unit consisting of a computer and other electronic hardware.



Fish TV’s transmitters sent out 1.6 megahertz “pings” that bounced off the zooplankton and returned data to the instrument’s receivers. It’s a system not unlike those used in ultrasound procedures for biomedical applications.



“That small zooplankton are capable of remaining at a constant depth with a precision of centimeters, sometimes in the face of strong vertical currents, implies that these organisms have extremely sensitive depth sensors, the nature of which is yet unknown,” said Genin. “That this depth-keeping behavior has evolved in so many different species implies that this energetically demanding behavior provides significant, yet poorly understood benefits. Revealing those benefits and the nature of depth sensing will be a major and exciting challenge for future research in zooplankton ecology and evolution.”



The research was funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research through the “Red Sea Program” and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation. Jaffe was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and California Sea Grant.


We do not as yet know just how these plankton can maintain their vertical position and sense depth so precisely, we just know that they can somehow do it. Another interesting avenue for science to pursue.

Bacteria with motors more efficient than anything man can design. Eyes that can see a much larger range of the spectrum than can a man's. Birds that can sense precisely the temperature inside a big clump of dirt and leaves and move a stick here and a few leaves there to adjust that temperature accordingly. All around us are organisms that are supposed to be behind us on the "evolutionary ladder" but are, at least in some ways, incomprehensibly superior.

One thing I wonder, were evolution actually true, why man wouldn't have evolved stronger bodies, better eyes, precise internal navigation systems, the ability to replace damaged or missing body parts, etc. These are all traits available in the massive gene pool that is all of life, assuming we all share in that pool.

But then some of what we find in nature may not make sense, really. Did Salmon have to evolve the ability to leave their freshwater birthplace, go out to sea to live in salt water, then return to their birthplace to spawn? Is there some kind of need for that? Would natural selection favor such an unusual cycle with the arbitrary need to come right back to the beginning for each Salmon? I think not. Are butterflies that must migrate thousands of miles better adapted for survival than butterflies that have no such need? No, not logically. One has to make leaps and twists of logic to explain why the Monarch would have been "selected" with such a difficult life cycle.

It all makes sense if God created. If he created many and varied kinds of creatures and placed within the gene pool many traits that could be selected to help ensure survival, then such creatures would in some form or another survive whatever the earth and mankind could throw at them. The Passenger Pigeon may be gone, but many other varieties remain. No one sees an Aurochs anymore, but we have lots of cows. Mammoths are gone, African Elephants remain. No matter what the evolutionists say, what we see in the real world is that each creature has the ability to adopt to new changes and to change with those changes while remaining what it is. Finches can vary in terms of the primary beak size and shape and remain finches.

If God did not create, the wide variety of creatures we find in the world doesn't make sense. One would expect evolution to select just a few "best-of-the-best" creatures to beat out the other candidates rather than having all these myriad creatures we have today. But if God did create, and create with man in mind, it makes sense. He made a beautiful and varied world for man's environment full of wondrous creatures from whom we could learn many things.

Navigation systems in Monarch Butterflies, designed by God, working just fine, thank you, to this day.