Filed under: in the news | Tags: butterflies, clocks, experiment, method, sensory ecology
Sometimes science is as simple as we claim it is. Have a look at this article in Science about how monarch butterflies tell the time of day, which they seem to do as part of navigating.
At first, the researchers thought that the lack of antennae was throwing off the timekeeping ability of the butterflies’ brain clocks. But when they looked at the expression of the clock genes in the brains of monarchs without antennae, everything appeared normal, suggesting that a separate clock existed in the antennae. So the researchers returned to the flight simulator. This time, rather than removing the antennae, they coated the antennae on some butterflies with opaque black paint and those of others with a clear enamel. If a sunlight-driven clock were in the antennae, the researchers hypothesized, only the monarchs with black paint would lose their ability to fly south.
It’s textbook scientific method: observation, consultation of prior knowledge, hypothesis, controlled experiment, data, rejected hypothesis, new hypothesis and new experiment, etc. And the result is very cool: the antennae seem to serve as biological clocks. Go read about it.
