| |

Avian navigation

ByRichard Nissen Reading Time: 1 minute

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 the link below.

Richard Nissen
Editor

>>>>>>>

A curious finding is reported in the 15 November New Scientist. Trained homing pigeons became disorientated when flying over a crater where the force of gravity was lower than normal.

Gravity is the weakest force and the intermediating particles are undiscovered, the force usually being understood in terms of the curvature of spacetime. Our normal understanding of brains does not allow for detection of presumably very minor fluctuations in the gravitational field, but it can be speculated that the radical pair entanglement in avian brains might somehow be up to this. It might also be worth considering that water courses, mineral deposits etc might create fluctuations in the gravitational field.

The reference is Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.108670

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Journal+of+Experimental+Biology%2C+DOI:+10.1242%2Fjeb.108670

Simon Raggett

Similar Posts

  • Emperor Penguins

    I have always been fascinated and touched by the devotion of Emperor Penguins and their rearing of a single chick in possibly the remotest and severest of environments on the planet. They breed in the depth of the Antarctic winter during 24 hours of darkness in temperatures which range from –20 C to – 50C…

  • Cuckoo Migration

    Cuckoo Migration is one of the great mysteries and to date there is still no agreement on how Cuckoos find their way to the Congo for the winter starting from different locations in Europe.   The team at Copenhagen University under Prof Kasper Thorup have been  able to tag fledgling cuckoos to follow their migration….

  • Universal Consciousness

    On 30th March 2015, Richard Silberstein gave a presentation to the Science Medical Network on “Universal Consciousness”: Mystics of various religious and spiritual traditions have, on occasion, described a mystical realisation as that of the entire universe’s conscious. In this talk, he described some novel parapsychological studies that may shed light on the question of whether consciousness constitutes an…

  • Another description of how animal navigation might work

    In a recent address to RIN Dr Kate Jeffery of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London described a very complete structure for understanding animal navigation. See https://animalnav.org/navigation-networks-in-the-brain/ We at www.animalnav.org have been struggling with exactly these concerns. Prof Jeffery postulates that you need four things to create a navigation system A compass…

  • Hefted Sheep

    This is an English term for sheep that learn to live in a particular location who do not stray from their “land”.  For us this is another piece of the jigsaw of how animals operate in the wild and know where “home” is. DEFRA ( Britain’s government Agency for Rural Affairs)  asked ADAS to do…