Super Navigators—Getting Around Without GPS!
June 17, 2019 at 12:19 a.m.
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Incredibly, they find their way using the sun, stars and other landmarks and some can fly up to 56,000 miles a year. According to a new book, entitled Supernavigators, ants and bees orient themselves by detecting the polarization of the sun. Bees also look for patterns that they recognize, regardless of whether they are natural or man-made. Dung beetles use moonlight and the Milky Way as their guide.
Seemingly delicate, monarch butterflies travel all the way to Texas and Mexico and get there by orienting the sun’s position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. The number of animals traveling long distances, from insects to sea turtles, and from eels to whales is astonishing, as are the many means they use to find their way.
David Barrie, the author, tries to address a number of questions regarding the methods animals use to navigate. Examples include how a dung beetle can roll a ball of dung in a straight line or how wasps after flying off on a hunting expedition can find their nest again?
What strange sense guides a sea turtle back to the beach where she was born to lay her eggs? And when a pigeon is released hundreds of miles away from its loft, in a place it has never gone before, how can it find its way home? His questions aren’t restricted to animals.
Even the lowest forms of life, can engage in a surprising means of navigation. The so-called magnetotactic bacteria contain tiny magnetic particles that, when joined end-to-end, act like microscopic compass needles. These “needles” force the bacteria to align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field and thereby help them find their way down to the oxygen-poor layers of water and sediment where they flourish. The needles found in bacteria from the northern hemisphere have the opposite polarity to those in the southern hemisphere.
Barrie’s book explains the challenge of navigating across a vast ocean without a compass and his book discusses how the animals maintain a steady course using odors, soundscapes and the weak Earth magnetic field. He even tells the story of a pigeon race that went awry in 1997, when infrared shock waves generated by the Concorde supersonic airliner led tens of thousands of birds, known for their navigational acumen, off course and many were never seen again.
A number of animals exclusively use the Earth’s magnetic field as a compass. The list with a magnetic sense has grown to include species in every vertebrate category, as well as certain insects and crustaceans. Some may use it to orient, such as blind mole rats. Others including salmon, spiny lobsters, and nightingales may use it for navigation and homing, alongside other sensory clues.
The Earth has a magnetic field similar to that of a bar magnet, it is composed with an extremely hot solid inner core, two thirds the size of the moon made up primarily of iron. At 5,700 degrees Centigrade this iron is as hot as the Sun’s surface, but the high temperature caused by gravity prevents it from becoming liquid.
Surrounding this is the outer core, a 2,000 kilometer thick layer of iron, nickel, and small quantities of other metals. Lower pressure than the inner core means the metal here is liquid. Differences in temperature, pressure and composition within the outer core cause convection currents in the molten metal as cool, dense matter sinks while warm, less dense matter rises. This flow of liquid iron generates electric currents, which in turn produce a magnetic field with north and south poles that engulfs the planet.
One other new book, Wayfinding, written by M.R. O’Conner, is worth reading. Wayfinding in the simplest terms is the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us. She writes about human navigation rather than animals and that collective storytelling and close observation were key to helping us find our way. Her study focuses on part of our brain, the hippocampus, a structure deep in the medial temporal lobe that is believed to be essential for maintaining one’s bearing in space and time. O’Connor is concerned that our reliance on GPS turn-by-turn direction will negatively affect hippocampal function in the future. Both O’Connor and Barrie have written books designed to make readers think about what we lose when we blindly outsource navigation to GPS.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
Incredibly, they find their way using the sun, stars and other landmarks and some can fly up to 56,000 miles a year. According to a new book, entitled Supernavigators, ants and bees orient themselves by detecting the polarization of the sun. Bees also look for patterns that they recognize, regardless of whether they are natural or man-made. Dung beetles use moonlight and the Milky Way as their guide.
Seemingly delicate, monarch butterflies travel all the way to Texas and Mexico and get there by orienting the sun’s position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. The number of animals traveling long distances, from insects to sea turtles, and from eels to whales is astonishing, as are the many means they use to find their way.
David Barrie, the author, tries to address a number of questions regarding the methods animals use to navigate. Examples include how a dung beetle can roll a ball of dung in a straight line or how wasps after flying off on a hunting expedition can find their nest again?
What strange sense guides a sea turtle back to the beach where she was born to lay her eggs? And when a pigeon is released hundreds of miles away from its loft, in a place it has never gone before, how can it find its way home? His questions aren’t restricted to animals.
Even the lowest forms of life, can engage in a surprising means of navigation. The so-called magnetotactic bacteria contain tiny magnetic particles that, when joined end-to-end, act like microscopic compass needles. These “needles” force the bacteria to align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field and thereby help them find their way down to the oxygen-poor layers of water and sediment where they flourish. The needles found in bacteria from the northern hemisphere have the opposite polarity to those in the southern hemisphere.
Barrie’s book explains the challenge of navigating across a vast ocean without a compass and his book discusses how the animals maintain a steady course using odors, soundscapes and the weak Earth magnetic field. He even tells the story of a pigeon race that went awry in 1997, when infrared shock waves generated by the Concorde supersonic airliner led tens of thousands of birds, known for their navigational acumen, off course and many were never seen again.
A number of animals exclusively use the Earth’s magnetic field as a compass. The list with a magnetic sense has grown to include species in every vertebrate category, as well as certain insects and crustaceans. Some may use it to orient, such as blind mole rats. Others including salmon, spiny lobsters, and nightingales may use it for navigation and homing, alongside other sensory clues.
The Earth has a magnetic field similar to that of a bar magnet, it is composed with an extremely hot solid inner core, two thirds the size of the moon made up primarily of iron. At 5,700 degrees Centigrade this iron is as hot as the Sun’s surface, but the high temperature caused by gravity prevents it from becoming liquid.
Surrounding this is the outer core, a 2,000 kilometer thick layer of iron, nickel, and small quantities of other metals. Lower pressure than the inner core means the metal here is liquid. Differences in temperature, pressure and composition within the outer core cause convection currents in the molten metal as cool, dense matter sinks while warm, less dense matter rises. This flow of liquid iron generates electric currents, which in turn produce a magnetic field with north and south poles that engulfs the planet.
One other new book, Wayfinding, written by M.R. O’Conner, is worth reading. Wayfinding in the simplest terms is the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us. She writes about human navigation rather than animals and that collective storytelling and close observation were key to helping us find our way. Her study focuses on part of our brain, the hippocampus, a structure deep in the medial temporal lobe that is believed to be essential for maintaining one’s bearing in space and time. O’Connor is concerned that our reliance on GPS turn-by-turn direction will negatively affect hippocampal function in the future. Both O’Connor and Barrie have written books designed to make readers think about what we lose when we blindly outsource navigation to GPS.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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