Suddenly after years of decline the eels are back swimming up the rivers in the west coasts of Europe in their millions. We think that their arrival is the result of a truly remarkable journey from their breeding grounds in the Saragossa Sea off Bermuda.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history for more history.
There is also the Sustainable Eel Group www.sustainableeelgroup.com
Every three years the Royal Institute of Navigation hosts a conference in the UK for everyone interested in Animal navigation. The next one is in 2016: RIN16 (Animal Navigation) 13/04/2016 12:00:00 to 15/04/2016 12:00:00 Royal Holloway College, London RIN16 Orientation & Navigation Birds, Humans & Other Animals will be the ninth International Conference on Animal…
Recently Vera Brust, Bianca Michalik and Ommo Hüppop have produced a paper called “To cross or not to cross – thrushes at the German North Sea coast adapt flight and routing to wind conditions in autumn”. They looked at some of the thrush family (blackbirds, redwings and song thrushes) that migrate across the North sea from the German…
Animals exhibit remarkable navigation abilities as if they have an internal compass. Head direction (HD) cells encoding the animal’s heading azimuth are found in the brain of several animal species; the HD cell signals are dependent on the vestibular nuclei, where magnetic responsive cells are present in birds. However, it is difficult to determine whether…
Humans, who are after all sophisticated animals have a very highly developed frontal cortex. This does our intellectual thinking. The right side is usually dominant. It also tends to be where humans view their world. Almost no humans feel and respond to the sub conscious. We have the concept of conscious frontal cortex operation and…
Simon Raggett (one of our editors) has sent us this fascinating link discussing the origin of life and the hidden role of Quantum Criticality: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552 as he says: This might be thought to have possible implications for links between organisms and surrounding electromagnetic fields. Simon Raggett
It is interesting, that the need to know how to get somewhere is often the trigger that enables navigation to begin. I discussed this with a friend of mine, whose wife always says, “Why do you use a SatNav when your own direction finding is better every time?” We discussed how his sense of direction…