The relevance of goal directed movement for insect pest control

Efficient locomotion is a fundamental feature and requisite of all insects. Some insects, such as mosquito larvae, travel just a few centimetres, whereas others, such as Bogong moths, migrate over several hundreds of kilometers. Some insects traverse in air, others in water and some on ground. For goal-directed movement, irrespective of body size, the scale at which insects move, or the medium in which they travel, the principles of navigation remain the same. In this article, we discuss some of the visual navigational tasks that insects carry out and highlight the recent techniques developed to reconstruct visual information and track animals with exceptional accuracy. We emphasise the need to understand the visual ecology of insects and to adopt tracking tools and methods to control the movement and spread of insect pests.