Topic: polarized ultraviolet light

Many aspects of sensory information are linked in the natural environment, and evolution has shaped different navigational strategies across species to take advantage of this. A well-known example is celestial navigation in insects. Fruit flies use the position of the sun to navigate, but they can also orient successfully under the daytime sky even when the sun is not visible. This robustness is possible due to other global skylight cues—such as polarized light, spectral contrast, and intensity gradients—which all change in a stereotyped manner with respect to the position of the sun. Recent w