[HN Gopher] Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance...
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       Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance navigation at
       night
        
       Author : Anon84
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2025-06-23 21:53 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | aa-jv wrote:
       | They're also considered a delicacy in that part of the world.
       | 
       | Always wanted to try them myself, but probably going to be more
       | partial to wittchety grubs ..
        
         | pastage wrote:
         | > [Bogong moths] provide an ample food source due to their
         | large numbers and high fat content.
         | 
         | Considering they were eaten near the alps where they spend the
         | summer sleeping in caves (aestivate not hibernate!), there must
         | have been some serious respect for that food resource. There
         | apparently are 16000 months per square meter in those caves.
         | Feels like the risk of over fishing is high.
        
           | aa-jv wrote:
           | I don't think the Australian aborigines ever overfished
           | anything. From my experience, they managed their resources
           | with superlative efficiency. 10,000 year old fish traps in my
           | old home region are still in operation...
        
             | adrian_b wrote:
             | Many kinds of aborigines in various parts of the world
             | where the Europeans have arrived only relatively recently
             | have been praised for the sustainable and efficient ways in
             | which they were exploiting their local resources.
             | 
             | Nevertheless, this assessment is true only for their more
             | recent history, i.e. for the last few hundreds or few
             | thousands of years before the contact with Europeans,
             | depending on the place.
             | 
             | Everywhere, their more distant ancestors had not practiced
             | a sustainable way of exploiting the local nature and they
             | had hunted to extinction many of the bigger animals, or
             | even all of them. Even many smaller animals and plants may
             | have become extinct as a consequence of human activities.
             | Only later, the aborigines have eventually learned to
             | practice a sustainable way of living, otherwise they would
             | have become extinct themselves.
             | 
             | This is also true for Australia, which was very different
             | by the time of the arrival of the first humans.
             | 
             | Unfortunately, while indeed many aborigines had learned by
             | necessity to be not greedy in order to have a society based
             | on equilibrium, not on growth, this did not happen for the
             | more "civilized" humans, because for a long time they were
             | able to expand over the rest of the world and now they
             | continue to hope for miracles that would allow unlimited
             | growth in the future too.
        
             | strken wrote:
             | I'm not an expert in archaeology, but this is more
             | complicated than it appears at first glance.
             | 
             | My understanding is that either people are in equilibrium,
             | or they are not. When they're not in equilibrium, they can
             | cause extirpation or extinction of food species if the
             | alternative is starvation. Once equilibrium is reached,
             | resources get managed pretty well, partly because anything
             | that's still around must be resilient and partly because
             | people learn to manage resources. Then the climate
             | unexpectedly changes, people leave equilibrium, food
             | sources either become available or disappear, and we can
             | see middens switch to different foods or become abandoned.
        
             | GTP wrote:
             | > 10,000 year old fish traps in my old home region are
             | still in operation...
             | 
             | You mean that the design is so old or that the traps
             | themselves are?
        
           | femto wrote:
           | They're actually in pretty serious trouble as a species, with
           | potential to go extinct.
           | 
           | https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-17/bogong-moth-
           | populatio...
           | 
           | I can remember bogon moths all over the fly-screens on our
           | house windows at nighttime in Sydney 50 years ago. In the
           | last 30 years or so, I've seen one bogon moth in Sydney (a
           | couple of years ago).
        
       | pastage wrote:
       | > Mouritsen-Frost flight simulator
       | 
       | Has apparently been used to study other insects (monark
       | butterfly). Seems to be a very simple construction a tube only
       | showing the night sky and recording of the flight direction.
        
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