ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Adaptive strategies of high-flying migratory hoverflies in response to wind currents.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Comprehensive stage- and tissue-specific transcriptome of the global ecosystem service insect, marmalade hoverfly Episyrphus balteatus.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Long-range pollen transport across the North Sea: Insights from migratory hoverflies landing on a remote oil rig.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Spatio-Temporal Variation in Aerial Arthropod Abundance Revealed by Weather Radars.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Lords of the flies: dipteran migrants are diverse, abundant and ecologically important.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Climate change is leading to an ecological trap in a migratory insect.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Migrating hoverflies as potential food source for co-migrating insectivorous birds.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Multiple factors contribute to female dominance in migratory bioflows.Open biology · 2025Article
- Review
- Enhanced flight performance in hoverfly migrants.iScience · 2024Article
- Monitoring aerial insect biodiversity: a radar perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Effects of nocturnal celestial illumination on high-flying migrant insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The most remarkable migrants-systematic analysis of the Western European insect flyway at a Pyrenean mountain pass.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Massive seasonal high-altitude migrations of nocturnal insects above the agricultural plains of East China.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- The efficiency of varying methods and degrees of time compensation for the solar azimuth.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Autumn migration of the migrant hawker (Aeshna mixta) at the Baltic coast.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Varieties of visual navigation in insects.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- The genome sequence of the Vagrant Hoverfly,Wellcome open research · 2023Article
- A cold high-pressure system over North China hinders the southward migration of Mythimna separata in autumn.Movement ecology · 2022Article
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8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Large migrating insects, flying at high altitude, often exhibit complex behaviour. They frequently elect to fly on winds with directions quite different from the prevailing direction, and they show a degree of common orientation, both of which facilitate transport in seasonally beneficial directions. Much less is known about the migration behaviour of smaller (10-70 mg) insects. To address this issue, we used radar to examine the high-altitude flight of hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae), a group of day-active, medium-sized insects commonly migrating over the UK. We found that autumn migrants, which must move south, did indeed show migration timings and orientation responses that would take them in this direction, despite the unfavourability of the prevailing winds. Evidently, these hoverfly migrants must have a compass (probably a time-compensated solar mechanism), and a means of sensing the wind direction (which may be determined with sufficient accuracy at ground level, before take-off). By contrast, hoverflies arriving in the UK in spring showed weaker orientation tendencies, and did not correct for wind drift away from their seasonally adaptive direction (northwards). However, the spring migrants necessarily come from the south (on warm southerly winds), so we surmise that complex orientation behaviour may not be so crucial for the spring movements.
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