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Articles on Animal navigation

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Geese fly day or night, depending on when conditions are best. sharply_done/E+ via Getty Images

How do geese know how to fly south for the winter?

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.

Monarch butterflies navigate using magnetism

Monarch butterflies navigate using a light-dependent magnetic compass. Patrick Guerra from University of Massachusetts Medical…
Not stopping for directions. Alan D. Wilson

Explainer: how do homing pigeons navigate?

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…
By attaching a small transponder to bees, researchers were able to track movements and feeding patterns. Andrew Martin

Fast food: how bees navigate to nectar, without the bumbling

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…

Making a bee-line for energy savings

Bumblebees use complex problem-solving skills to minimise the energy they use when flying to collect food. For the bumblebee…
queens Patrick Schultheiss

What ants can teach robots

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…

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