Welcome back to your daily bird research briefing. It's Saturday the 13th of June, 2026, and I've got five papers for you today that span quite a range — from freshly described ghost moths in Western Australia, to 147 priority wetlands mapped across the EAAF, to a finding in *Nature* that might just redefine what we think insect brains are capable of. Let's take each one in turn and really dig in.
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### Paper One: Ghost Moths of the Sandplains — Five New Australian *Abantiades*
*Zootaxa*, accepted March 2026
Let's start with taxonomy, because it's worth reminding ourselves that we're still genuinely discovering Australia's moth fauna. A paper accepted in *Zootaxa* in March of this year describes five new species in *Abantiades*, the endemic Australian genus of ghost moths — also known as swift moths or, wonderfully, rain moths. This brings the known species count in the genus to a new high, and it's a good illustration of how much remains undocumented in our own backyard.
So first, some context on the family. Hepialidae — the ghost moths — are an ancient lineage. We're talking about one of the most basal families of Lepidoptera, with a fossil record going back to the Cretaceous. They're also physically impressive: some of the heaviest moths in the world come from this family, and *Abantiades* in particular includes species with wingspans exceeding ten centimetres. The name "rain moth" comes from the spectacle of adults emerging — often in their hundreds or thousands — immediately after significant rainfall, which can happen remarkably fast. Males, which are often smaller, appear to swarm in search of the larger, more sedentary females. It's a striking natural event, and one that most Australians who've witnessed it don't forget easily.
*Abantiades* is entirely endemic to Australia, with species distributed from the tropics down through temperate zones. Their larvae are subterranean root-feeders — they can spend several years underground before pupating, feeding on the roots of native shrubs and trees. This lifestyle makes them ecologically important as nutrient cyclers in many woodland and heathland systems, and it also makes them very difficult to study.
Now to this paper. Four of the five new species come from the Geraldton Sandplains biogeographic region of Western Australia — a region of globally significant plant diversity, and one that has been less intensively surveyed for invertebrates than many comparable hotspots. The fifth species is from south-east Queensland. The researchers worked from museum specimens as well as recently collected material, using a combination of morphological examination and DNA barcoding. Crucially, they've now produced barcodes for all known *Abantiades* species — a major resource for future work, because distinguishing *Abantiades* species by morphology alone is genuinely difficult. Wing pattern, body size, and genitalic structure are the key characters, but there's significant variation within species and convergence between them. Having a genetic reference library transforms the situation.
The paper also clarifies an important taxonomic character for the genus — resolving a point of ambiguity that has complicated species-level identification for some time. Four of the new species have names evocative of their morphology or geography: *A. patella* sp. nov., *A. kolpodes* sp. nov., *A. lepusaures* sp. nov., and *A. incognito* sp. nov. are among those described.
Why does this matter beyond the satisfaction of discovering new species? A few reasons. First, *Abantiades* species are likely indicators of healthy, intact native vegetation — their multiyear larval period in the soil means they're sensitive to habitat disturbance. We can't monitor species we don't know exist. Second, the Geraldton Sandplains face ongoing pressure from agriculture, mining, and urban expansion. Three new species from a single biogeographic region is a flag: we should be looking harder at what else is there. Third, some hepialid species are known to be prey for specialist predators — they're part of food webs in ways we've barely started to characterise. And finally, the DNA barcode resource created here will allow environmental DNA surveys to detect *Abantiades* from soil samples — opening up a completely new window on their distribution and abundance without requiring you to collect and kill a single adult moth.
This is quiet, fundamental science — exactly the kind of work that underpins everything else we try to do in conservation.
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### Paper Two: Mapping the EAAF's Most Important Wetlands — 147 Sites, 10 Countries, 34 Threatened Species
*Scientific Reports*, 16: 1916, published December 2025
The second paper is a landmark piece of applied conservation science, and one with direct relevance to flyway work you'll know well. Published in *Scientific Reports* in December, it's led by Mike Crosby of BirdLife International in Cambridge, with co-authors Shelby Wee, Ding Li Yong, Gary Allport, and a very large international team spanning conservation organisations and government agencies across Asia.
Their task: to identify the priority wetland sites that should anchor the EAAF Regional Flyway Initiative. For those less familiar, the EAAF — the East Asian-Australasian Flyway — is routinely described as the most threatened of the world's eight major flyways. Wetland loss across East and Southeast Asia has been staggering: tidal flat area has declined by as much as 70% in some regions over recent decades, driven by coastal reclamation, urban expansion, and aquaculture. Against that backdrop, the recently established EAAF Regional Flyway Initiative is an ambitious multilateral effort to bring a meaningful set of wetlands — in ten Asian countries — under improved protection, management, and restoration, while also creating economic alternatives for local communities.
But you need a site list to work from. That's what this paper provides — and it's been built carefully.
The team started with a broad canvas: a minimum of 270 internationally important wetlands identified through existing analyses and expert consultation as candidate localities for deeper assessment. From there, they applied a layered set of international criteria. The primary framework is aligned with the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands — specifically the criteria used to designate Wetlands of International Importance — as well as the EAAF Partnership's own Flyway Site Network criteria and the Important Bird and Biodiversity Area thresholds. Critically, they drew on newly revised population estimates for EAAF waterbird species, which provide the denominators for calculating whether a site supports internationally significant numbers.
The core scoring tool — what they call Prioritisation Criterion 1 — works like this: for every EAAF waterbird species recorded at a given site, you calculate what proportion of the global population of that species the site supports. You then sum those proportions across all occurring species, weighted by conservation status. Sites hosting larger proportions of more threatened species score higher. It's a sensible and transparent metric, and it allows direct comparison across very different sites and countries.
The result: 147 sites of high conservation priority identified across the ten countries. Both freshwater and coastal habitats are represented — an important point, because the flyway isn't just tidal flats; it includes inland lakes, rice paddies, reservoirs, and river systems that are critical for different species at different times of year. At least 34 threatened species — including some for which these sites hold significant proportions of their entire global populations — are represented in this set.
The authors are refreshingly candid about what the study doesn't resolve. Identifying a site as a priority in an ecological sense is one thing; securing its future is another. They stress the need to reconcile selected sites with the development priorities and governance frameworks of each country, and to think carefully about ecological connectivity between sites — a bird flying between sites that are individually protected but ecologically disconnected isn't much better off. They also flag the need to evaluate these sites for their ecosystem services, because in many of these countries, the economic argument for wetland protection is as important as the biodiversity argument.
What this paper gives us is a scientifically credible, defensible site list — the kind of thing that can be put in front of governments, used to channel funding, and anchor international agreements. That's not a small thing.
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### Paper Three: Why Do Coastal Shorebirds Wait So Long to Breed? New Answers from Australian Banding Data
*Ecology and Evolution*, published June 2025
Paper three comes from Danny Rogers of the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research in Victoria, working with Theunis Piersma, Clive Minton, Adrian Boyle, Chris Hassell, Ken Rogers, Andrew Silcocks, and Jorge Gutiérrez. It's published in *Ecology and Evolution* and it addresses a question that's been quietly puzzling shorebird biologists for a long time: why do so many migratory shorebird species delay their first breeding attempt by several years?
Let me frame the question more precisely. In many migratory shorebirds, especially the long-distance species that breed in the Arctic, individuals don't return to the breeding grounds during their first, second — or in some species even their third or fourth — post-hatching summer. They stay on non-breeding grounds, in places like the tidal flats of Australia, through multiple annual cycles before making their first breeding migration. From a life-history standpoint, this is costly. Every year you don't breed is reproductive output you'll never recover, unless you're compensating with better survival or higher fecundity once you do start breeding.
Rogers and colleagues tackled this with an unusually rich dataset. They drew on counts, recaptures, and long-term banding data across 37 shorebird species that use Australian non-breeding grounds. For each species, they estimated the age of first return migration — that is, the age at which individuals first begin appearing on northbound migratory movements — as a proxy for the age at first breeding attempt. The banding data was particularly valuable here: Australia has one of the longest-running shorebird banding programmes in the world, accumulated over decades at key sites like Corner Inlet, Roebuck Bay, and the Gulf of Carpentaria, providing sample sizes and age-class data that simply aren't available elsewhere.
The headline finding is clear: coastal species delay maturity significantly more than species that spend the non-breeding season in non-tidal inland wetlands. This holds up after controlling for body size, migratory distance, and other life-history variables. The pattern is real and it's consistent.
The explanation the authors put forward is intuitive once you hear it, but it hadn't been rigorously tested before. Foraging on intertidal substrates is cognitively and physically demanding in a way that foraging in inland wetlands simply isn't. On a tidal flat, your prey — bivalves, polychaetes, crustaceans — are buried at varying depths in sediments that change daily with tides, season, and temperature. The optimal bill strike depth, the appropriate substrate cues, the timing of foraging relative to tidal cycles — all of this takes time to learn and refine. Mistakes are costly, both energetically and in terms of mortality risk from poor body condition. By contrast, inland wetland species foraging on invertebrates in relatively stable, less dynamic environments can apparently become competent foragers more quickly, and so can afford to begin breeding earlier.
The conservation implications are significant and somewhat sobering. Coastal shorebird species are precisely the species under greatest pressure in the EAAF — the ones depending on tidal flats that are disappearing. And now we understand that they're also species with inherently slow population dynamics. A species that doesn't breed until year four or five, and which then faces elevated adult mortality from habitat degradation in the non-breeding season, is extraordinarily vulnerable. Its population can decline for years before recovery is even possible, because the pipeline of breeding individuals is so long to fill.
This paper also has practical monitoring implications. If you want to assess the health of a shorebird population, age-class structure matters — and this work gives you better calibrated expectations for what the age structure of a healthy population should look like for each of the 37 species examined. Deviations from expected age structure can be an early warning signal.
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### Paper Four: Two Routes, One Bay — Satellite-Tracking Whimbrels Along China's Coast
*Ecology and Evolution*, published August 2025
Our fourth paper moves us to Hangzhou Bay on China's east coast, and to the Whimbrel — *Numenius phaeopus* — a species that illustrates many of the central challenges of EAAF shorebird conservation in concentrated form. The paper is by Ke He, lead author at Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University in Hangzhou, working with Zhen Xian Zhu, Tinghao Jin, Jun Yan Feng, Xilai Zhou, Lingling Wei, and Baoquan Liu.
Hangzhou Bay is a funnel-shaped estuary that sits in one of the most economically dynamic regions of China. It's also a critically important staging area for shorebirds moving along the coast, and the team has been tracking Whimbrels from this site since 2018. The study draws on five years of satellite-tracking data — 13 individual Whimbrels — which is a reasonably substantial sample for a large-bodied shorebird tracking study.
The first major finding concerns migration routes. As the tracked birds moved south from Hangzhou Bay, they followed broadly similar coastal paths through China's eastern provinces. But at around 45 to 50 degrees north latitude — roughly the level of northeastern China and the Korean Peninsula — the birds split into two distinct routes. One group continued along a more coastal or near-coastal trajectory; the other moved further inland. The two groups also differed in their southward migration speed, suggesting the routes aren't equivalent in terms of the stopover opportunities they offer, or possibly that the individuals taking them differ in some other way — perhaps by subspecies.
That subspecies point is worth pausing on, because Whimbrels are not a single uniform entity. The study confirmed the presence of two subspecies at EAAF stopover sites in Hangzhou Bay: *N. p. variegatus*, which breeds across Siberia and East Asia, and *N. p. rogachevae*, a subspecies whose population status is poorly understood but which is considered of conservation concern. Disentangling the movements, population sizes, and habitat requirements of these subspecies is genuinely important — conservation measures calibrated only to the species level may miss critical differences.
The site fidelity data is striking. Tracked birds showed high inter-annual fidelity to Hangzhou Bay, with substantial overlap in their core activity zones across years. This is consistent with what we know from other large shorebird species, but it has an important implication: if conditions at Hangzhou Bay deteriorate — through habitat loss, disturbance, or prey depletion — these birds are not going to simply find another site. They're committed to this location in a way that makes them particularly vulnerable to local changes.
From the 13 tracked individuals, the team identified 52 discrete stopover sites used during southward migration. The protection status analysis shows 73.1% of these sites fell within formally designated protected areas — a figure that sounds reassuring until you look at the regional breakdown. The discrepancy between inland and coastal sites is significant: inland stopover sites were more consistently covered by existing protected area networks, while some of the most critical coastal staging areas remained outside formal protection. Given that intertidal habitat is under greater development pressure than most inland wetland types, this imbalance is concerning.
The paper adds to a growing body of satellite tracking work showing that the apparent coverage of the EAAF's protected area network masks important gaps — particularly along the coast where development pressure is highest and habitat loss is ongoing.
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### Paper Five: Bogong Moths Navigate by Starlight — And We Now Know How
*Nature*, 643(8073): 994–1000, published June 2025
And now for the paper I've been building towards, because I think it's one of the most remarkable findings in insect biology of recent years. Published in *Nature* in June 2025 — so now just over twelve months ago — this is the work of David Dreyer, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Lund University in Sweden, together with Eric Warrant, a professor at Lund who has spent decades working on the neurobiology of low-light vision and navigation in insects, and an international team including researchers from Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK.
You'll know the Bogong moth — *Agrotis infusa* — as an ecologically significant Australian species, and one that's been in trouble. Numbers have declined dramatically over recent decades, with drought, insecticide use, and light pollution all implicated. But the biology of this animal is extraordinary, and this paper adds another remarkable chapter.
Every spring, Bogong moths complete a northward migration of up to a thousand kilometres from their lowland breeding grounds — in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria — to the alpine caves and rock crevices of the Snowy Mountains, the Australian Alps, and the ACT. There they aestivate in dense aggregations through the hot summer months, before returning south to breed in autumn. This migration happens at night. And for decades, researchers have puzzled over exactly how these centimetre-long moths manage to navigate so accurately across such vast distances in the dark.
Previous work — much of it also from the Warrant and Mouritsen groups — had established that Bogong moths can use the Earth's magnetic field as an orientation cue. But magnetic information alone doesn't easily explain the accuracy of their navigation. Dreyer, Warrant, and their colleagues suspected the moths were also using the night sky.
To test this, they used a planetarium-style experimental enclosure — a dome with a tethered moth suspended at the centre, connected to an electronic transducer that recorded the direction it was attempting to fly. By projecting different representations of the night sky onto the dome — accurate star maps, rotated versions, distorted versions — they could test precisely what celestial information the moths were responding to.
The results were unambiguous. When presented with an accurate representation of the night sky, the moths oriented in their expected migratory direction. When the star map was rotated by 180 degrees, the moths also shifted their orientation by 180 degrees. And critically — when the stellar pattern was distorted, scrambled in a way that preserved brightness and density but destroyed the rotational structure of the sky — the moths lost their orientation entirely. They weren't using the Milky Way as a landmark, or fixating on any particular bright star. They were using the overall rotational structure of the celestial sphere — the way the stars move around the pole — as their compass reference. This is, to use the technical term, a stellar compass.
This is significant for several reasons. First, it makes Bogong moths the first invertebrate — the first insect — known to use stellar navigation for long-distance migration. Stellar compasses have been documented in birds, in particular nocturnally migrating songbirds, where the mechanism was worked out beautifully in the 1960s and 70s. But finding the same strategy in an insect was unexpected — and it raises fascinating questions about how independently this capability evolved, and what it says about the computational capacity of an insect brain with fewer than a million neurons.
Second, it integrates with the magnetic compass data in an interesting way. The moths appear to combine celestial and magnetic information — consistent with what we see in migratory birds, where different cues can serve as backups or be weighted differently under different conditions. A cloudy night probably forces greater reliance on magnetic cues. A clear night may allow precise stellar reference. The redundancy suggests these systems co-evolved precisely because neither cue is always available.
Third — and this connects directly to conservation — the reliance on the pattern of the stars makes Bogong moths acutely sensitive to light pollution. Artificial lighting doesn't just distract or disorient them locally; it potentially degrades the celestial information they rely on for large-scale navigation. Combined with the already-documented effect of artificial light on magnetic compass orientation, you have a situation where light pollution is attacking the moth's navigation system on two fronts simultaneously. In areas of dense light pollution along migration corridors, these moths may genuinely lose the ability to navigate accurately — and may never reach the mountain caves where their population dynamics depend on successful aestivation.
It's a finding that should change how we think about light pollution as a conservation threat. It's not just about birds flying into lit buildings. It's about the degradation of the night sky as a navigational resource — for moths, for birds, potentially for other organisms we haven't studied yet.
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### Closing
That's your five for this week. If there's a thread that ties them together, it might be this: the more deeply we look at the biology of these animals, the more demanding their environmental requirements turn out to be. Ghost moths need intact native vegetation and undisturbed soil for years at a time. Coastal shorebirds need a decade of foraging experience before they can breed competently. Whimbrels are loyal to specific bays in ways that make them vulnerable to local habitat loss. Bogong moths navigate by the stars — and need the stars to still be visible to do it. In each case, the specific details of the biology are telling us something about where conservation interventions need to be targeted, and why broad-brush protection isn't enough.