The Speed of a Moth Which is faster? A small moth or a songbird?
The answer does surprise. A study published in March 2011 in
Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers at Rothamsted
Research, and the universities of Lund (Sweden), Greenwich and
York, reports the surprising finding that night-flying moths are
able to match their songbird counterparts for travel speed and
direction during their annual migrations but they use quite
different strategies to do so - information that adds to our
understanding of the lifestyle of such insects, which are
important for maintaining biodiversity and food security. This
new international study of moth migration over the UK, and
songbird migration over Sweden, funded by the Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Swedish
Research Council, shows that songbirds (mainly Willow Warblers)
and moths (Silver Y moths) have very similar migration speeds —
between 30 kilometers and 65 kilometers per hour — and both
travel approximately northwar