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Oceanic navigation in Cory’s shearwaters:
Evidence for a critical role of olfactory cues for homing after displacement in open ocean. Procellariiformes are pelagic birds which wander in the open sea most of the year and often nest in remote oceanic islands. These birds are able to pinpoint their breeding sites following straight routes even if their nesting island is located…
The migration of the Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga Stiata) in the New World
There have been many recent press reports of work done by Dr Bill DeLuca of the University of Massachusetts. On the migration of the Blackpoll Warbler. Please find a description of this work here: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-tiny-songbird-migrate-non-stop-miles.html see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpoll_warbler Animalnav.org has been talking about very long migrations of birds over the ocean for a long time and…
The hippocampus of rats
Prof Kate Jeffery has done some very interesting work on how the hippocampus of rats processes navigational information. Scientists are clear that the hippocampus is critical for navigation but believe that it is only one part of a larger system that has many functions including recognising landmarks, computing distances and directions etc. and forming memories….
How young cuckoos find their winter grounds
Please find this interesting link to important work on Cuckoos done by Kasper Thorup and his team in Denmark. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0168940 They were able to tag and therefore track fledgling cuckoos. This work is very important as the major question for us is, how does a fledgling cuckoo find its way to its wintering grounds in…
Our co-editor Antonio Nafarrate has recently written these remarks
Following the 2016 Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) Conference on “Animal Navigation”, Dr. Painter claims that after some 50 years of work, the Magnetic “mechanism is not fully understood”. In my judgment, it will never be, because there is no such mechanism. The Geomagnetic Field (GMF) is only a minor perturbation to the true navigational…
New Study Fuels Debate About Source of Birds’ Magnetic Sense
This link gives you a very good overview of the latest arguments about whether Cryptochromes, which are sensitive to magnetic fields and exist in the eyes of birds, help with their navigation. All the great and good involved in this field are quoted. I personally do not think that the quantum effects in a Cryptochrome…