Australia’s iconic bogong moths are the first creatures other than humans and some birds known to navigate by the night sky.
Articles on Animal navigation
Displaying all articles
Insects such as ants and beetles use ingenious processes in their brains to work out how far they’ve travelled and in what direction - we’ve now discovered how they remember their way home.
On starlit nights, the Milky Way acts as these beetles’ primary reference. But light pollution gets in the way.
Geese honk loudly and point their bills toward the sky when they’re ready to start the migration. Here’s how they know it’s time, how they navigate and how they conserve energy on the grueling trip.
Much of what we know about these elusive eels’ life cycle has been based on circumstantial evidence. Now for the first time, scientists tracked an adult eel to its distant spawning ground.
How do these massive sea turtles stay on target as they migrate hundreds of miles through featureless open ocean?
“Blind as a bat” goes the saying – but that’s a myth. Small bats have perfectly good eyesight for their size, but they can also call upon “extra senses” which humans can only achieve with technology. These…
Monarch butterflies navigate using a light-dependent magnetic compass. Patrick Guerra from University of Massachusetts Medical…
Pigeons have extraordinary navigational abilities. Take a pigeon from its loft and let it go somewhere it has never been before and it will, after circling in the sky for while, head home. This remarkable…
A new facet of the honeybee “waggle dance” - in which bees dance to inform their counterparts where to find a food source…
How do insects, given their poor visual resolution and small brains, cope with the huge challenge of finding food at more than one location and returning home immediately afterwards, day after day? Mathieu…
Ocean warming is forcing marine life closer to the cooler waters of the poles, but the location of terrestrial species seems…
Bumblebees use complex problem-solving skills to minimise the energy they use when flying to collect food. For the bumblebee…
Bees remember landmarks and read information from the sky to find their way home from an amazing 11 kilometres away and over…
Can an ant’s strategy for moving around be useful for building robots with autonomous navigation? Working with experts in the field of artificial intelligence, we have just begun to explore this possibility…
Top contributors
-
Professor of Biology, Clarkson University
-
Research Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
-
Lecturer in Animal Cognition, Queen's University Belfast
-
Professor of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University
-
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, Australian National University
-
Professor of Animal Behaviour, University of Oxford
-
Professor of Biology, Université Laval
-
Research Scientist, Fisheries and Oceans Canada
-
Postdoctoral researcher in Functional Zoology, Lund University
-
Research Fellow, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg
-
Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University
-
PhD Candidate in Computational Neuroscience and BioRobotics, University of Edinburgh
-
Professor of Zoology, Lund University