Day-active bees, such as the fabled honeybee, are well known for using visual landmarks to locate a favoured patch of flowers and to find their way back to their hive. Researchers have now found that nocturnal bees can do the same thing, despite experiencing light intensities that are more than 100 million times dimmer than daylight. The new findings, reported by a team led by Eric Warrant of the University of Lund, Sweden, advance our understanding of the visual powers of nocturnal animals.

The competitive and dangerous world of the tropical rainforest has driven many normally day-active animals to adopt a nocturnal lifestyle, with the cover of darkness allowing them to exploit food resources in relative peace. Several groups of bees and wasps--including the Central American halictid bee Megalopta genalis--have become nocturnal, and despite the darkness and their apparently insensitive compound eyes, they have retained remarkable visual abilities. In the new work, performed on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, the researchers used infrared night-imaging cameras to show that by performing special orientation flights, Megalopta visually learns landmarks around the nest entrance prior to foraging and uses these landmarks to locate the nest upon return. The researchers found that if landmarks were moved to a nearby site while the bee was away, upon her return she intently searched for her nest in the landmark-bearing, but wrong, location.

Despite this impressive behavioral sensitivity, optical and physiological measurements revealed that Megalopta's eyes are only about 30 times more sensitive to light than those of day-active honeybees, woefully inadequate to account for Megalopta's nocturnal homing abilities. A solution to this paradox may lie outside the eye. The researchers found that specialized visual cells in the bee's brain had morphologies suited to summing light signals and intensifying the received image.

'"/>

Contact: Heidi Hardman
hhardman@cell.com
617-397-2879
Cell Press
9-Aug-2004

Page: 1
Related biology news :

1. AAAS 2004 salary survey: Despite long hours and low pay, life scientists love their work
2. Despite confinement, crop genes can spread fast to wild
3. Jefferson Scientists Find Evidence Of Potentially Infectious HIV In Semen, Despite Inability To Detect Active Virus In Blood
4. Commercial Fish: Eat Up, Despite Low Levels Of Mercury
5. Despite Odds, Little Known Grauers Gorillas Persist In Central Africa
6. Dinosaur ancestors vision possibly nocturnal
7. Cardiac arrest may hinder ability to learn certain tasks
8. Atacama rover helps NASA learn to search for life on Mars
9. New sign language suggests children create languages fundamentals through learning
10. Can an old gene learn new tricks?
11. In a world of distortion, archer fish learn to judge absolute size of aerial prey