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…
It is clear that animals which humans domesticated were all chosen because they were amenable to domestication. This happened at several sites all over the world and the animals were mostly the same. Dogs and horses seem to have always been the top of the list. The cow is an unlikely animal to have chosen…
Back in 1975, I watched on television a man seated in the stern of a rowing dinghy, keeping his head down over a pair of angle-rods, and directing a boy to row him across a wide, tidal creek to a distant, red plastic mooring buoy. The lad at the oars naturally had his back to…
Whilst the outbound track for these seals is random in search of food. When the seals feel it is time to return home they choose a perfect straight great circle route home. (A great circle route is the one that modern airliners use as this is the shortest distance between two points on the globe). This…
Elephant seals (sea elephants) are large, oceangoing seals in the genus Mirounga. There are two species: the northern elephant seal (M. angustirostris) and the southern elephant seal (M. leonina). Both were hunted to the brink of extinction by the end of the 19th century, but numbers have since recovered. The northern elephant seal, somewhat smaller than its southern relative, ranges over the Pacific coast of the U.S., Canada and Mexico….
Evidence for a critical role of olfactory cues for homing after displacement in open ocean. Procellariiformes are pelagic birds which wander in the open sea most of the year and often nest in remote oceanic islands. These birds are able to pinpoint their breeding sites following straight routes even if their nesting island is located…
Analysis of GPS recorded tracks of intact trigeminal sectioned pigeons. Conditioning studies have shown that the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve is functionally involved in the perception of the geomagnetic field intensity. However, homing experiments conducted in the field with homing pigeons demonstrated that trigeminal mediation of magnetoreception is neither necessary nor sufficient for…
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