Secrets of Animal Navigators

USING SUPER SENSES OF SIGHT, SOUND, MAGNETISM, AND A WHOLE LOT MORE

- Alice Andre-Clark

Many animals find their way across continents or even around the world every year. The homing pigeon will fly up to 700 miles (1,127 km) in a single day to return to its roost. How does it figure out how to get there? How does the loggerhead turtle navigate 7,500 miles (12,070 km) across the Pacific Ocean? We humans sometimes need GPS just to get to dance class! The answer is migrating animals have a variety of super skills. Sometimes they use the same basic senses we do to get around, other times they sense things our bodies can't detect.

Written in the Stars

In a long-distance animal migration, there are no sign posts or roads to follow, but there's always the Sun. The monarch butterfly uses the Sun to navigate from the northern United States to central Mexico. The Sun changes position in the sky throughout the day, so the monarch adjusts its calculation of what's south for different times of day. "It is really an incredible feat that these little butterflies are able to make that amazing long-distance migration," University of Chicago ecologist Marcus Kronforst has said.

If you travel at night, you can't rely on the Sun. Harbor seals navigate by the stars when they search for food at night. In one experiment, the animals were able to follow a specific star in a planetarium "sky." When nocturnal dung beetles want to roll their pile of poop away to a safe spot, their compound eyes can't make out individual stars. But they can use the light of the Moon to find their way.

Animal Magnetism