Bauer, S., Shamoun-Baranes, J., Nilsson, C., Farnsworth, A., Kelly, J. F., Reynolds, D. R., Dokter, A. M., Krauel, J. F., Petterson, L. B., Horton, K. G. & Chapman, J. W. 2019 The grand challenges of migration ecology that radar aeroecology can help answer. Ecography42, 861-875. doi: 10.1111/ecog.04083. Bauer9 2019 Many migratory species have experienced substantial declines that resulted…
http://www.hfsp.org/hfsp-news-events/discovery-human-geomagnetic-sensory-system IntroThis link is fascinating and shows that humans can sense the magnetic field even if they do not know that they have. We already know that a lot of animal navigation takes place in the hippocampus i.e. in the Subconscious. Could this mean that there might be a correlation with the way that humans react to…
AbstractThis is an analysis of how magnetic fields affect biological molecules and cells. It was prompted by a series of prominent reports regarding magnetism in biological systems. The first claims to have identified a protein complex that acts like a compass needle to guide magnetic orientation in animals (Qin et al., 2016). Two other articles report…
Here is a fascinating YouTube video discussing different ways a pigeon might home. The people shown here are our heroes, who are really important people in the animal navigation world and especially in Pigeon navigation. You will find Tim Guildford at Oxford University, who believes that pigeons follow landmarks, The Wiltchokos who believe in magnetic…
There is a lot of work going on in the navigation field. All the researchers in this field are now clear that navigation takes place in the sub-conscious. I made the mistake of thinking that native peoples who seemed to navigate perfectly without any aids could tell me how they did it, but language is…
Editor’s comments: This paper is quite old but it does propose another navigation mechanism than the current obsession with magnetic orientation. The magnetic field has the terrible drawback of changing all the time and birds have migrating successfully before and after the Earth’s magnetic field flipped South for North. Albatrosses fitted with head magnets (to…