Study
What Is Migration?
Dingle, Hugh; Drake, V. Alistair
BioScience, 2007
Reviews the definitions of migration used across ecology, entomology, ornithology and oceanography, and proposes a behavioural definition based on persistent, straightened-out movement with suppressed responses to resources that would otherwise arrest it.
- Studied in
- Animalia
- Sample size
- conceptual review across taxa
Migration is better defined by the behaviour of the individual — undistracted, directed movement, with station-keeping responses temporarily switched off — than by distance travelled, seasonality, or whether the animal returns.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
A behavioural definition unifies cases that a distance-based or seasonal definition splits, and separates migration from dispersal, ranging and nomadism, which have different causes and consequences.
How NatureHQ reads it
The record that keeps NatureHQ from calling every long journey a migration. It is the reason the migration page opens with what does not count: an animal wandering until it finds food is not migrating, however far it goes, and an aphid flying two hundred metres with its feeding responses switched off is.
- A definitional paper: it argues for a framework rather than reporting a measurement, and other definitions remain in use.
- The behavioural criterion is hard to observe directly in large animals, so in practice it is often inferred from track shape.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Migration
Migration is not defined by how far an animal goes. It is defined by a change in behaviour: movement that keeps going in one direction while the responses that would normally stop it are switched off.
Migration
There is no single migratory pattern. Some populations go every year and some only in bad years; in many species some individuals leave and their neighbours stay.
Published by: University press journalsPublished in a university press journal.
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-03.