01 July 2011 by Tristan Gooley
I have been meaning to blog about whales for some time. My apologies to those who have gone without a good whale navigation blog for too long and who have doubtless suffered needlessly as a result.
A story about the way whales navigate made the news a few weeks ago. Having rushed to buy the academic research paper behind the story, entitled ‘Straight as an Arrow’, I can confirm that it is indeed a fascinating story. However, the fascination lies not in the research content but in its honest gaps. For the research a team tracked humpback whales over journeys of 8000km with great precision using satellite-monitored radio tags.
These researchers knew to expect impressive navigational abilities, but were shocked by quite how direct the whales were. They move in straight lines, which poses the obvious but wonderful question: How?
Going into the research, it was thought that the two…
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Tags: animal navigation, science, whales |
07 April 2009 by Tristan Gooley
I came across this story this morning about a pet dog, Sophie Tucker, that was washed overboard in rough conditions during a sailing holiday off the Australian coast and swam five miles to the small uninhabited island of St Bees. 
The story focuses on the distance swum, which is incredible enough, but makes no mention of how the dog found the island. We can rule out vision, because she would not have been able to see further than about twenty feet in front of her in those conditions. Even in flat calm a dog would barely able to see the tops of trees five miles away because of the curvature of the earth’s surface.
Smell is the most likely solution, but that points to an even tougher dog, because to follow the smell of land she would have had…
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Tags: animal navigation, sixth sense, st bees, trees, wind and waves |
I have been meaning to blog about whales for some time. My apologies to those who have gone without a good whale navigation blog for too long and who have doubtless suffered needlessly as a result.
