Bogong Moths
This paper is about the extraordinary Bogong moths of Australia who navigate to caves in the mountains during the summer to avoid high temperatures
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The efficiency of varying methods and degrees of time compensation for the solar azimuth
This paper on navigation using the sun is an interesting one by Richard Massy and Karl R. Wotton. Already Tristan Gooley the natural navigator and one of our heroes walked across Crete to prove that the brain can in fact compensate for the movement of the sun during the day and keep a course by…
Interaction between man and dolphins, written by Dante
Intro >> Here is a lovely quote about the interaction between man and dolphins written by Dante in his Divine Comedy written in Italy in the early part of the 14th Century. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy for more. In Canto 22 (in translation from the original) “Just as dolphins do, when with the arched back, they signal to the seamen to prepare for…
Timing avian long-distance migration
Susanne Åkesson is one of the foremost academics working in the field of animal navigation. Her recent paper: “Timing avian long-distance migration: from internal clock mechanisms to global flights” is impressive and important. Please see attached the whole paper: Timing avian long-distance migration: from internal clock mechanisms to global flights. One of the critical questions is…
How young animals learn to migrate
While advances in biologging have revealed many spectacular animal migrations, it remains poorly understood how young animals learn to migrate. Even in social species, it is unclear how migratory skills are transmitted from one generation to another and what implications this may have. Here we show that in Caspian terns Hydroprogne caspia family groups, genetic and foster…
Animal navigation and biological rhythms: the inertial theory by Antonio B. Nafarrate
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…
The “V” formation of flying geese
A recent piece of work by a team lead by A. . Kölzsch from Germany tracked a family of Greater White-fronted Goose (Anser albifrons) This goose is a great migrator and winters (December to February) in Western Europe where the researchers were helped by colleagues in the Netherlands for this study. The geese migrate in…