Insects watch skies to navigate

They demonstrated that fruit flies, equipped with complex compound eyes, keep their bearings by using the polarisation pattern of natural skylight, some of them for thousands of miles, according to Caltech-Washington statement.u00a0

Demonstrating that fruit flies can navigate using cues from natural skylight makes it easier to use genetics to better understand the complex capability and exactly how it is implemented in the brain.u00a0For millennia, seafarers have depended on the sun to know their position in the world, but often the sun is not visible.

Polarisation vision solves that problem, Dickinson said, because if there's even a small patch of clear sky in a fruit fly's very broad range of view, then the natural light patterns can provide location information.