| | |

Animal navigation is one of the great mysteries

This site has been created to share information and invite you to contribute in order to see if we can find out how animals and humans navigate without aids.

There has been a lot of academic work in this field which is difficult to follow without interpretation. We shall try to put as much of this in front of you as we can.

My view is that there must a simple overall mechanism that drives animal navigation. No-one has yet found this, but I suspect this maybe to do with a quantum effect meditated directly though our brains acting as antennae.  We are also clear that different species use different strategies and that, above all, all navigators use different cues at different parts of the journey.  For instance, you only need rough directions: “go North”, for instance,  at the beginning of a journey and much more detailed information at the end, finally relying (usually) on visual recognition of “Home” the end of the journey.

We really treasure feed back on this site but especially we are looking for participation in having you give us your views or experiences so that the site can grow to contain many people’s ideas and experience.

Similar Posts

  • Murmuration

    http://vimeo.com/31158841 This video shows the amazing whorls and patterns made by a flock of starlings.  You might see these over cities.  These displays used to be common over London, and I think still are over Rome. Whilst there has been much scientific research and theories on why starlings do this, the contention is that the…

  • Bar headed goose

    Recent work at Bognor University by a team headed by Charles Bishop has shown they actually follow the contours as they fly from their breeding ground in the high lakes North of the Himalayas south over the Himalayas into the Indian sub continent See wikipedia for images and an overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar-headed_goose This is an interesting…

  • Classic navigation

    In classic navigation at the beginning of the journey we need to know where we are in order to plot where we are going.  If you navigate with a compass you need a map to show you where you are and where you want to go. This then gives you a bearing and distance. With…

  • Ingo Schiffner at RIN11

    At RIN11 Ingo Schiffner gave his presentation Mathematical Analysis of Pigeon Tracks (the characterisation of the underlying navigational process). He analysed 167 tracks with birds navigating from four different locations and from two different directions. His theory is that pigeons navigate using at least four different components and these components change over the course of…

  • Avian navigation

    Intro This piece has been forwarded to me by one of our editors: Simon Raggett. He gives us the quantum twist. You will also find much written here on the subject of avian navigation based around gravity from our editor Antonio Nafarrate, who has been in communication with the authors of this piece. Please follow…