Do animals have a sense of direction? How do they find their way home? Learn about animal navigation and how different creatures use their senses to get around.
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…
Dr Kate Jeffery is one of our heroes and has a lab at University College London where she experiments with what the brain is doing when rats navigate around a maze. In her experimental rig, she can see neurons fire up as the rat faces in different directions (head direction cells) while it is exploring….
You will find other descriptions here of Henri Weimerskirch’s work on Albatrosses under Albatrosses on this site as well as Anna Gagliardo’s work on the use of smell in navigation. A book recently written by Adam Nicholson called “The Seabirds Cry” is fascinating about the mythology and lives of the sea birds in his book;…
Warrant11 2016 Here is a fascinating paper about The Australian Bogong Moth Agrotis infusa: which is the most amazing Long-Distance Nocturnal Navigator. As they navigate at night their feat is perhaps even more amazing than the migration of the Monarch butterfly in the USA. Richard Nissen editor Warrant E, Frost B, Green K, Mouritsen H, Dreyer D, Adden A, Brauburger K and Heinze S (2016) The Australian…
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/212/22/3597.full This link is a very complete overview of the animal navigation at present in 2015. It covers all the important work that has been done and discusses what has been found along with all the problems associated with different approaches. As you will see it ends up by saying that we still do not…
I love this little observation by James Mather… “I was on a ladder clearing the gutters end of last week, and over a period of hours heard a number of flocks of birds gathering to migrate, and I could see them heading off in V-formation. Then, at one point, low cloud closed in, but I…
I was looking through an old copy of Classic Boat magazine (September 2004) when I discovered this article on how traditional Polynesian navigators operated. I have précised this article. For me, the importance of all this is that humans are animals but we can communicate together so that insights on how we navigated before the…
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