With the emergence of GPS, the need to think has diminished our innate navigational skills.
Rosamund F Langston, PhD Lecturer in Behavioural Neuroscience at Ninewells Hospital describes this loss of our innate navigational skills, because like all skills, if you do not use them, you lose them.
She includes map reading as one of the soon to be forgotten skills, but also a sense of direction too.
There was a recent article in the media, including the New Scientist and the Times about the migration of the Banded Stilt, which seems to migrate very fast at short notice. The recent interest has been triggered by work done at Deakin University in Victoria Australia by Reece Pedler. Banded Stilts normally live on the…
Lisa Spiecker1,*,‡, Malien Laurien1,*, Wiebke Dammann1, Andrea Franke2,3, Catriona Clemmesen4 and Gabriele Gerlach1,2 ABSTRACT Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), an ecologically and economically important species in the northern hemisphere, shows pronounced seasonal migratory behaviour. To follow distinctive migration patterns over hundreds of kilometers between feeding, overwintering and spawning grounds, they are probably guided by orientation mechanisms. We…
Here is a link to Monarch Butterflies http://phys.org/tags/monarch+butterflies/ Editor’s remark I have difficulty understanding these results which suggest that Cryptrochromes are involved which I am fairly clear is impossible as there is not enough time for the quantum coherence to take place. Inclination compasses are very inaccurate as there can be huge changes locally due to…
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…
How do pigeons navigate? Racing homing pigeons navigate incredible distances with apparent ease. A champion racing pigeon can be released 400 miles from its home loft, in a place it has never been before, and return within 1 day. The last 40 miles of its journey, the bird navigates by sight. But over the other 360…
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…
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