The Magnetic Sense of the Monarch Butterfly

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In a storage shed under a cloudless Texan sky in November, Robin Grob performed open brain surgery on a monarch butterfly. Tape strips kept the butterfly’s black and orange wings open and fixed his hairy body with white spots under a microscope. Through the lens, the brain appeared as a tiny yellowish mass, in which a tetrade—four electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, had been inserted. Looking down, Grob, neurobiologist at the Norwegian U…