By Susan Milius
Hugh Dingle is gracious about geese and robins. They may be the most popular icons of migration, winging south in the fall and lifting people’s spirits in spring, when they finally honk or bob-bob-bob their way back to the same territory. For decades, a bird-based idea of migration dominated popular and scientific thinking: Individual animals went somewhere each year, then came back.
In the 1960s, however, entomologists began to free themselves from the traditions of bird behavior and consider migration in broader terms, says entomologist Dingle of University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Today’s view puts more emphasis on the behavior of the organism and less on the route.