快猫短视频

CLOCKS, calendars, maps, compasses and technologies like GPS 鈥� with these inventions we may finally be able to rival the navigational talents present elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Animals on the move face formidable challenges and have evolved brilliant strategies to overcome them. The sun, moon and stars, and the Earth鈥檚 magnetic field, might seem like obvious cues on which to take a bearing, yet the ways that animals use them are ingenious. Less obvious but no less impressive are the body clocks, visual colour gradients, olfactory memory and cognitive maps that are also exploited in the name of orientation.

In Nature鈥檚 Compass, husband-and-wife pairing of evolutionary biologist James Gould and science writer Carol Grant Gould tour these talents. They reveal how the butterfly Danaus plexippus, for instance, 鈥渆mploys an internal clock, calendar, compass, and map to commence and measure the two-thousand-mile annual journey to Mexico 鈥� all with a brain that weighs only a few thousandths of an ounce.鈥�

Not content with just detailing these marvels of nature, the authors aim to set the record straight and champion the spatial awareness of animals. 鈥淲e are guilty of a condescending anthropomorphism, reading into other orders of beings our own blindnesses and computational limitations,鈥� they write.

Using a small cast of model species, including the desert ant, bumble bee, homing pigeon, salmon and migratory birds, they cover the breadth of orientation and navigation strategies on offer. In the course of this journey, there are glimmers of experimental detail, like researchers gluing pig bristles to the legs of ants, moving hives to flummox bees or mounting magnetic-field disrupters to the heads of pigeons 鈥� all cunning strategies to manipulate animal perception of the world and find out what it means for navigation.

Unfortunately, the authors do not dwell on the human protagonists involved in these studies and the drama of these historical moments is largely lost, even when they describe the pioneering work in which they themselves had a hand. As a consequence, Nature鈥檚 Compass loses its way, making for a difficult read on a fascinating topic.