Big milestone in Trondheim! On June 25th, Daniele Tacchio successfully defended his Master’s thesis with us at the el Jundi lab back at NTNU.
In his research, Daniele tackled a pretty fascinating question: How do non-migratory monarch butterflies actually orient themselves? He investigated if and how these butterflies use the Earth's magnetic field to find their way around.
But Daniele didn't just spend his time in the lab in Norway. He also showed some serious adventurous spirit. He headed out to Texas as a field assistant to study the world-famous monarch migration right where the action happens.
Huge congratulations on your Master’s degree, Daniele! 
Thank you so much for your hard work in the lab, your amazing efforts in the field, and for being such a great part of the team. We wish you all the very best for your next chapter - keep that research spirit alive! ​

Stable neural coding of heading across locomotory modes by the insect compass system
To establish a robust representation of heading, animals rely on multimodal integration of visual cues and self-motion information produced during locomotion. How animals capable of multiple modes of locomotion, such as walking and flying, maintain a heading representation across these different modes remains unexplored. Here, we demonstrate that the representation of heading coding in monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) remains remarkably consistent across locomotor modes, allowing heading information acquired during walking to also be used in flight. Tetrode recordings from the central complex, the brain region encoding heading in insects, allowed us to monitor the neural activity of individual butterflies that transitioned from quiescence to walking and from walking to flight. Comparing azimuthal tuning across these behavioral modes, we found dramatic state-dependent shifts that transformed a frontally biased heading coding in quiescence into a continuous, full 360° heading representation during walking and flight. This 360° heading representation was established even in an ambiguous visual setting and when the animals’ eyes were occluded, showing that self-motion inputs during active movement generate a heading signal that is independent of locomotor mode. Remarkably, despite the fundamentally different proprioceptive feedback from wings versus legs, the heading network maintained a consistent azimuthal tuning across walking and flight. This demonstrates that the monarch butterfly central complex integrates locomotor-specific signals into a unified heading signal. Together with visual information, this establishes an efficient navigation system in the monarch butterfly brain, capable of transferring relevant heading information from one mode of locomotion to another.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.05.063

Visual cue properties determine innate orientation strategy in Monarch butterflies
Animals rely on a wide range of environmental signals, including celestial and terrestrial cues for navigation. While celestial cues, such as the sun, play a major role in maintaining a constant heading during long-distance migration and dispersal, terrestrial cues provide an animal with a short-range navigation system, ideal to pinpoint highly specific locations. In Monarch butterflies, the simulation of a terrestrial landmark, i.e. a vertical stripe, induces an attraction behavior (all animals head toward the stimulus) while a small green light spot, simulating the sun, elicits menotactic orientation (animals adopt individual-specific headings relative to the stimulus). However, the mechanisms underlying how the animal distinguishes between a stimulus as a terrestrial landmark versus a celestial cue remains unclear. To explore this, we tested non-migratory Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) in a flight simulator. The inner surface of simulator was equipped with an area of LEDs, allowing to present different visual stimuli to the butterflies during tethered flight. By systematically manipulating the stimulus’ width, height, brightness, and elevation we found that Monarch butterflies exhibited attraction behavior to high contrast areas, like stripe edges. Menotactic behavior was not achieved by solely decreasing the stimulus to a small light spot but also required for the stimulus to be presented at higher elevation to be interpreted as a sun stimulus. These findings suggest that multiple parameters, inherently set by the butterfly’s navigation system, are critical to interpret a visual stimulus as celestial cue or terrestrial landmark, producing dynamic switches between different orientation strategies during navigation.
doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.16.732693