Professor Dr Eric James Warrant

Research Priorities: Visual ecology, nocturnal vision, animal navigation, animal migration
Eric Warrant is an Australian-Swedish sensory biologist. He studies how insects use their vision and other sensory information to orient themselves and to navigate at night. He has established the basic principles that enable animals to see well in extremely dim light, which has led to new camera technologies that work much better at night.
Eric Warrant and his research group were the first to determine that nocturnal insects have extraordinary night vision despite their tiny eyes and brains, and that they rely on visual information to orient and navigate at night. Together with his research group, Eric Warrant discovered that some nocturnal insects possess trichromatic colour vision which they use to find flowers at night. He has also discovered that other nocturnal insects use visual landmarks to navigate home after a long foraging trip at night, and that some use the weak pattern of polarized light which forms around the moon to maintain a straight-line course. If the moon is absent, they can instead rely on the broad band of light in the Milky Way.
Recently, Eric Warrant discovered that the Bogong moth, which migrates over a thousand kilometres from across southeast Australia to a small number of caves in the Australian Alps, uses the earth’s magnetic field and the stars as a compasses to reach its final destination, a place it has never previously been.
The biologist was further able to show that the extraordinary visual abilities of nocturnal insects are based on neuronal summation mechanisms in the brain. This processing strategy significantly increases the reliability of vision in dim light by summing light in time and space, enhancing the perception of slower and coarser visual details while maintaining colour information. This real-time processing strategy has been successfully Implemented in camera technology.