[HN Gopher] Learning about the navigational feats of animals
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Learning about the navigational feats of animals
Author : gmays
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-04-03 09:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| edem wrote:
| There is a theory that migrating birds can _see_ the magnetic
| fields using quantum mechanics.
| aksss wrote:
| > ask [people] to walk across a field toward a target, and then
| conceal the target after they start moving, they will stray off
| course in approximately eight seconds
|
| In sea kayak navigation you quickly learn the importance of
| observing your reciprocal heading, the bearings of visible
| landmarks, and paying attention to wind direction relative to
| your heading. That works on land too, but people aren't inclined
| to be that observant unless taught and a habit formed.
|
| The article is full of fascinating trivia, but the point about
| geese that overwinter in your local park having missed out on a
| migration as a gosling and thus never learned how to navigate
| to/from home, was fascinating to me - we have a lot of those
| geese and mallards that spend the winter here. I've often
| wondered if they stay all year or have shorter migrations.
| tchvil wrote:
| My disabled aunt went regularly to Lourdes in France for some
| hopeful cure.
|
| Once, at the moment to leave to the train station, the cat was
| nowhere to be found. Heartbroken she left her there, and took the
| train.
|
| 9 months later a dirty and skinny white cat stood in front of her
| door in the very north of France. The cat crossed the whole
| country!
| uh_uh wrote:
| How is this possible? What was the signal that told the cat it
| was going in the right or wrong direction?
| Tade0 wrote:
| If she travelled with the cat it might have picked up all the
| scents along the way, but I'm not sure if cats are even
| capable of doing that.
|
| Or better: the cat snuck into a familiarly smelling train and
| got out at the right stop.
|
| We used to move back and forth every few months between two
| cities 1500km apart. Our cat could tell if he was in any of
| those two cities - he would suddenly start meowing, wanting
| to get out of the car.
|
| He was very consistent in this. He wouldn't do that when we
| were driving through any other city.
| ozim wrote:
| I expect that if cat would somehow knew the shortest way back
| home it would arrive in less than 6 months.
|
| What I googled was that cat average walking speed would be
| 3.3km/h. If a cat would walk for 6 hours a day it should cover
| like 20km a day. From Lourdes to Belgium it is like 1000km,
| when one selects walking path on google. With that in mind it
| should be something like 50 days or 2 months by shortest path.
|
| For me that cat was badly lost, well being a cat you don't have
| restaurants but as in the first paragraph if it would not be
| lost I would expect it to come back in less than 6 months.
|
| In the end it found its way but that would be the same for me
| if I take the wrong exit at the highway and I am 1 hour later,
| I was lost for that hour.
| bbarnett wrote:
| To be fair, taking time to stalk and kill prey, slow travel
| time.
| ozim wrote:
| When I read your comment I thought that yes I probably
| underestimate how much it takes to hunt for food if you are
| a house cat, hungry for couple of days. Because one does
| not get 100% hit when hunting.
|
| So it would be more like I knew where to go but I had to
| take that highway exit because I badly had to use the
| toilet. Maybe those 9 months would be quite right.
| tchvil wrote:
| Or take into account my fledging memory. This is an old
| story, and 6 months or 9 months didn't make a big
| difference until now and this math. Will ask my aunt.
| Roark66 wrote:
| I'm not quite convinced that "animals don't get lost". How many
| lost cats never return for every one that does? Did anyone ever
| make a real study?
|
| Also there are other questionable bits in the article for example
| "We now have geolocation devices light enough to be carried by
| monarch butterflies". Where are those devices described? For
| years I've been looking for a reliable GPS tracking for cats that
| don't require the use of a collar (which is a huge risk to a cat
| in dense vegetation). There is nothing on the market (that I know
| of) that would be available as a small wirelessly charged
| implant, or even better something tiny that could be attached to
| the fur like goosegrass pods.
|
| I bet other outdoor cat owners would pay good money for devices
| like that, but other than a periodic kickstarter scam there is
| nothing.
| goda90 wrote:
| I'm not convinced either, because there are cases of animals
| found after long periods of starvation when the animal probably
| knows it can find food at home. But it is possible that those
| animals are driven to hide in fear instead of braving a return
| to their home. Also the ones that never return may have just
| died instead of being truly lost. There lots of dangers out
| there. And there's also cases of theft.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I have a weird feeling when cats go missing they want a new
| home, or want to roam?
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| This is actually how we acquired our first cat. A cat just
| turned up at our door one day and basically moved in - we
| didn't feed her at first, but she slept and played with us (3
| kids)
|
| Eventually my parents managed to track down the actual owner,
| turns out the cat and her sister didn't get along too well in
| the same house, she only went there to eat.
|
| The owner was more than happy for us to properly adobt her.
|
| No clue why she chose us, but cats are territorial animals so
| it makes sense that they can just not like tho they're living
| with.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Presumably it is https://monarch.engin.umich.edu/ which isn't
| really a geolocation device, it's a environmental logger that
| can (apparently) be used to infer a track.
| frereubu wrote:
| As far as I'm aware you're right about the geolocation devices.
| This is a great podcast about a guy working on Project ICARUS,
| where they're working on tracking thousands and thousands of
| animals with small geolocation devices so we have much better
| data to work from -
| https://www.bigbiology.org/season-2#episode43. From what I
| recall the idea of tracking butterflies was something they were
| working on but hadn't cracked yet. I think it was towards the
| end of the podcast, but I'd recommend the whole thing.
| [deleted]
| ssr2020 wrote:
| Every year thousans of birds, animals migrate thousand of
| kilometers and they do not lose their way. This is a proof they
| knows how to find their ways. It is understood that navigation
| has been taught and equipped for them.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Every year thousands of humans migrate thousands of
| kilometers without getting lost. That doesn't mean humans
| can't get lost.
|
| There is a lot of survivorship bias in your assumption. How
| many animals fail to complete those migrations?
| _Microft wrote:
| I heard that most cats are actually found _before_ they are
| lost, i.e. well-meaning people bringing them to an animal
| shelter while the cat would have been perfectly fine on their
| own. I can not say how they came to that conclusion (a guess:
| maybe by owners saying that it was perfectly normal for the cat
| to roam the same distances from home as when they were caught
| and brought to the shelter?)
| Grazester wrote:
| I have had probably more than a hundred cats throughout my
| childhood more than 13(kittens) at one given point. All my cats
| were outside/indoor cats free to go and come and I am convinced
| that the cats that would go out and not come back were either
| killed by dogs in the surrounding neighborhoods or simply
| didn't not want to come back. The cats that would not usually
| return were the older ones. If a younger cat did not return
| then I assumed it was dead.
|
| We had given a few cats aways and they would sometimes come
| back home after a week or so. We lived on a mountain and my
| Aunt miles away in the valley and a cat we gave her came right
| back home. We gave away another few that did the same thing
| this time in even further locations.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > The cats that would not usually return were the older ones.
|
| Cats that are about to die will often go off somewhere by
| themselves.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Cats have personalities.
|
| I'm sure you know this, but maybe have not considered it in
| this context.
|
| There have been humans in my life I did not like, or who
| drove me bonkers. Perfectly good people, but just a
| personality conflict. Who's to say, that it isn't the same
| for some cats? Just a personality conflict, and so they seek
| life elsewhere.
|
| And only a 100 years ago, most cats were farms cats, as most
| people lived in rural areas. Many cats were barn cats,
| familiar with humans, but mostly wild, living off of mice and
| other vermin.
|
| Those genes don't vanish in 100 years. Maybe some of those
| older cats just preferred independence?
| dsego wrote:
| Male cats are usually the ones to go out and then come back
| in a few days, next time few weeks, then months... and then
| they disappear for good. I've never had a female cat go away
| like that.
| rlander wrote:
| Does that apply to neutered males?
| dsego wrote:
| Probably not, that would be my guess.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Monarch butterflies are tracked by tags, rather like ringing
| birds
|
| Source https://monarchjointventure.org/faq/track-the-migration
| akiselev wrote:
| Monarch butterflies are tracked by people, who use the unique
| identifiers on the passive tags to identify butterflies and
| record where they were spotted/captured. The tags themselves
| are no more than a sticker designed to stick to butterflies
| without impeding or harming them - they started making them
| in 1992, afterall.
|
| GP is talking about active tags that get their coordinates by
| using GPS satellites and (I assume) phone home in some way.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Well, I've worked on one such geolocation device about the size
| of a grain of rice, and that was 30 years ago. It was a
| tracking device started by a former Israeli military
| intelligence officer after his family was scattered in a
| terrorist attack and it was days before everyone could be
| accounted. This tracking device was the size of a pack of
| cigarettes' when in development, and by the time I left the
| company (late 1990) the company was being sold to the Israeli
| government and the device was the size of a grain of rice. It
| provided 3D location in an area via 3-way triangulation of
| telecommunication tower signals.
| bitwize wrote:
| Small enough to be snuck into a vaccine dose and secretly
| injected!
| aksss wrote:
| We talkin' basmati or sushi rice? And how was it powered?
| insickness wrote:
| When I lived in an apartment in New York City, I had an indoor
| cat. One day I was talking to my neighbor with the door open and
| the cat peeked her head out, sniffing around. She was a
| stereotypical fraidy cat, always scared of everything, so when
| she walked out the door, I knew she wouldn't go far, especially
| when she walked up the stairs outside my apartment. I few minutes
| later I hear her meowing like crazy. I went up a flight of stairs
| to find her standing in front of the same exact door as mine, one
| flight up, meowing to get in.
| euroderf wrote:
| We live three flights up but the cat will only go two flights
| up. I think it's because the cat only skips one floor, and he
| can't count, not even to two: he can only register one floor-
| skip.
| shard wrote:
| (Star Trek the Wrath of Khan) Spock: He is intelligent, but not
| experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.
| nnvvhh wrote:
| This happens to my cat in Brooklyn. We walk with him up or down
| a flight of stairs to an identical-looking floor, and if any
| disturbance occurs on the other floor he runs to "our" door. We
| get a real kick out of his mistake.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| The problem for humans is that the need not to be lost has
| vanished with modern cities, public transport,and more recently,
| GPS. Most humans don't actively look for reference points when
| traveling. I remember going to pick mushrooms with my in-laws in
| a forest a few miles from their house. My mother in law was
| navigating it like Mowgli: she knew every single nook and
| cranny,the specific trees and exits into forest separation lines.
| I was lost there in 2 min, couldn't tell one tree from another
| and had no idea where north/south is. The difference between me
| and her is that she's been doing it for years and 'scans' the
| forest as soon as she walks in.
| dsego wrote:
| Ha, my parents are like that, they love to pick mushrooms and
| they know their terrain and have pretty good orientation. I got
| lost a few times going with them and not keeping up or
| wandering off in the wrong direction. Luckily, I could hear
| their shouts.
| Salamat wrote:
| Even in the desert where the landscape in always infux with
| sand dunes, people used to travel the desert and they still do
| in Africa and the middle east, they look up the into the sky
| for stars etc.Beduens still do it there, they unril recently-
| used to travel either walking or in camel convoys from Syria to
| Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. But when I got lost in the desert -
| car broke down- at dusk I had to wait walk, in the wrong
| direction as it turned out, untill sunset.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| William Thesiger in his book recounts that the Bedouins he
| traveled with could also identify and navigate based on the
| shape of the dunes too, and they had memory and recognition
| of various dune landscapes from many, many places.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| If I had to guess, I would suppose that they are not
| recognising specific dunes (which would be constantly
| changing), but patterns in the dunes caused by prevailing
| winds. I am sure there is something analogous to the
| Polynesian voyagers recognising patterns in the waves and
| currents of the ocean.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Dunes are changing much more slowly than you think. They
| are huge and heavy, and they can hold shape for decades.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Animals do totally get lost and disoriented. Unless the headline
| and the article differ wildly, the premise is so preposterously
| fallacious that i didn't bother RTFA. It's like an article titled
| "why the earth is flat".
| willvarfar wrote:
| It's a shame you didn't read the article. It's actually good
| popular science commentary. Hopefully it will snag some readers
| and make the investigate deeper.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/ltolE
| burlesona wrote:
| The idea that humans are the worst navigators ever is rather
| silly. Humans who actually explore the world without being spaced
| out by their smartphone can roam and find their way back
| perfectly well.
|
| But navigation is like a muscle, and most of us have allowed it
| to atrophy because it's easy to just mindlessly follow what your
| GPS of choice tells you to do.
|
| I don't think the "humans can't navigate" premise of this article
| would have passed as plausible a mere thirty years ago.
| jmchuster wrote:
| Huh? The article devotes several paragraphs talking about how
| good humans have been at navigating and lists multiple feats as
| evidence.
| burlesona wrote:
| Quote:
|
| > The second is that the creatures with a credible claim to
| being the worst navigators on the planet have steadily
| reduced the odds of all the others getting where they need to
| go, by interfering with their trajectories, impairing their
| route-finding abilities, and despoiling their destinations.
| Those feckless creatures are us, of course.
| swsieber wrote:
| It's definitely a skill. I play minecraft infrequently with my
| brother in law and he can retrace his steps in the nether (and
| in the overworked) with complete ease. I in the other hand
| struggle.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I find if I go somewhere with my phone navigating, I have much
| less of a sense of how to backtrack. If I use written
| directions or a paper map, I can usually get back with little
| difficulty.
| watwut wrote:
| Animals do get lost.
| dazc wrote:
| As kids, we had a tortoise that wandered off one day only to be
| found by complete chance in a neighbours garden many months
| later. It disappeared again not long after never to be seen
| again.
|
| Either the tortoise really didn't like us or it just never
| found its way back?
| aksss wrote:
| Or killed by a cat / played with to death by a cat.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Or it had everything it needed without you...
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| My dog doesn't get lost, he's a giant akita, super sweet and
| friendly, but I mean, he looks like a wolf. I don't want him
| getting out, but before he was neutered, and I added an l-footer
| made out of chicken-wire, he figured out ways to get out.
|
| So I would drive out to go find him and by the time I got back,
| he was waiting outside the door, barking to get in, usually with
| some stolen toy at his feet.
|
| Now, I've doggy-proofed the yard so he can't get out, but I don't
| know how he does it but he never gets lost. No matter how far he
| goes, he's always back before dinner time.
|
| So that's why I'm always thinking that self-driving cars are not
| going to happen anytime soon. Everyone's underestimated the
| problem.
| aksss wrote:
| Animals don't get lost the same way Mitch Hedberg never got lost
| - build a house. Are you lost? Once, now I'm home.
| dsego wrote:
| Any tldr for someone not willing to read the whole essay?
| tubularhells wrote:
| Life is short. Get a cat.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I don't know how far the cat got, but I had a similar experience
| with moving into a new house. The previous owners had to leave
| without the cat because it mysteriously left about a week before
| they had to move and didn't show back up.
|
| Three weeks later, a very scrawny cat showed up at my door and
| wouldn't leave. I let it in and fed it and then got in contact
| with the previous owners. They drove two hours back to get the
| cat. The wife was beside herself with joy. The husband told me
| quietly he'd hoped he'd never see the cat again. Sorry, buddy.
| csomar wrote:
| > he husband told me quietly he'd hoped he'd never see the cat
| again.
|
| Do you suspect he's involved in the disappearance of the cat?
| ourmandave wrote:
| We lost our cat and months later got a call from the shelter.
|
| The neighbor down and around the corner had saved him from his
| dog and brought him in. They IDed him from the chip.
|
| Later at the vet, they told us cats can get lost being only a
| few houses away.
|
| I imagine it's a whole different perspective seeing things from
| one foot off the ground.
| clairity wrote:
| i found a kitten crying under a car in front of my building 2
| 1/2 months ago. after i bathed him and fed him (he gulped
| down 3 helpings of food!), he set up camp like he owned the
| place, to the dismay of my dog and cat. i learned later he'd
| been outside for about 4 days.
|
| i found the owner, who lived a couple blocks away, via his
| chip as well. she was in recovery from an accident and was
| reluctant to take him back, so i fostered him for 2 months. a
| couple days after i finally returned him to her, she tried to
| give him back to me (which i had initially suggested to do if
| she didn't want him) due to misbehavior and prodded by an
| apathetic boyfriend. but after reassuring her and talking
| through training ideas, she kept him and so far has been
| happy with that decision. he's a very energetic but also very
| loving little guy.
| ourmandave wrote:
| You're good people, clairity.
| detritus wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure I read a year or two back that Cats have an
| odd sense of direction in which they don't 'join up'
| different paths - say, that from out of the front of a
| building, to that out of the back.
|
| Rings true with a cat we have in our building here which
| simply cannot register that the back door has access for it,
| so waits out front no matter how inclement the weather.
|
| Mind you, it IS a cat - so likely purposefully being an
| arsehole for some particular reason.
| rlander wrote:
| That's weird. We moved to a new house and I was surprised
| one morning to see the cat scratching the upper balcony
| door, waiting to be let in, even though he'd never used
| that particular door until that day. He seems to always
| wait by the door that's closest to the nearest awaken
| human, regardless if he's ever used that entrance.
| KMag wrote:
| To be fair, I know lots of people who will walk 2 sides of
| a triangle because they know how to get from A to B and A
| to C, but just don't have a sense that B and C are rather
| close. I think they feel there's probably a shortcut
| between B and C, but they just don't have the sense of
| direction to just walk in the general direction from B
| toward C until things start looking familiar.
|
| I also can't count the number of times I've argued with
| someone about the direction to walk because their phone's
| compass is off in a dense urban environment. They insist on
| walking the direction they think Google Maps is telling
| them to walk, only to have the whole map spin after walking
| half a block when the compass gets its bearings. I've seen
| the same person dumbfounded several times by this.
| burnte wrote:
| I've had android phones for 11 years. Every single one
| gets my orientation wrong when driving but stopped. If
| I'm at an intersection stopped, and open Maps, it thinks
| I'm pointing in the direction opposite my real
| orientation EVERY SINGLE TIME. On all the phones I've
| had, I swear to god there's a flag on my google account
| that was used 11 years ago and fogotten about that fixed
| a bad compass or something.
| grey413 wrote:
| I hate it when map apps spin. Just absolutely hampers any
| ability to develop a bigger picture idea of how you're
| navigating, and is terribly confusing when the app gets
| your heading wrong, as your friend found out.
| KMag wrote:
| I don't like self-orienting phone maps, but people who
| never learned to properly read a map are likely to have
| trouble with maps that don't self-orient. They're better
| off with self-orienting maps, even if the self-orienting
| map sometimes are incorrectly oriented.
| katbyte wrote:
| Up is always north in my phone, and I'm always amazing
| how it trips people up
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I've done that in myself in Manhattan. I always travel
| there by train and would take a circuitous route by
| train, only to realize when driving last year that I was
| like a 10 minute walk away!
| KMag wrote:
| When I first got to MIT, some students told me how to get
| to CambridgeSide Galleria mall: either walk to the
| Keandall/MIT T (subway) station and wait 20 minutes for
| the free shuttle bus to the mall, or take the red line,
| switch to the green line in central Boston, and head out
| to Lechmere station. The mall is a few minutes' walk from
| Lechmere station.
|
| I took the free shuttle bus once, and realized the mall
| is 5 to 10 minutes by foot from the MIT/Kendall T
| station. I don't know how you make several runs by
| shuttle bus to get a few things for your dorm/fraternity
| room and don't realize it's silly to wait for the bus. If
| the weather is bad, or you're coming back with a lot of
| things, that's one thing, but it's generally silly to
| wait for that shuttle bus. I knew more than one MIT
| student who thought it was a long way to the Galleria
| because of the long wait for the shuttle bus or the long
| T ride into Boston and back out. Of course, this was
| before smart phones, and I'm not even sure Yahoo maps
| were popular my freshman year, so these students probably
| never looked up the location of the Galleria a map.
| tubularhells wrote:
| I know someone who freezes on trips in other countries
| when she enters an underground station and the map stops
| responding. She just doesn't understand why the magic
| stopped working. She is so dependant on Google maps that
| she doesn't trust herself anymore. I tried to explain GPS
| and satellites, but she is dense.
| toast0 wrote:
| That sort of explains why my barn cat likes to spend a day
| going in one door of my house and out another. We do have a
| lot of exterior doors, so it's kind of like the Scooby Do
| hallway scene, but with an orange cat asking to come in and
| out.
| filoeleven wrote:
| This condition can be present in humans too.
|
| > Not to be confused with healthy individuals who have a
| poor sense of direction, individuals affected by DTD get
| lost in very familiar surroundings, such as their house or
| neighborhood, daily.
|
| Someone who has it explained to me that seeing the same
| room from a different direction doesn't even register as
| the same place.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographical_disorientatio
| n
| ShawnCleverdon wrote:
| Please stop perpetuating the myth that cats are
| "arseholes".
|
| Cats, much like dogs, and every other non-human on the
| planet, have different drives and understandings than a
| human. Just because we aren't capable of fully
| understanding those drives isn't a reason to denigrate
| them.
|
| The next time your cat does something that is outside of
| your understanding, please have a little compassion.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's not about understanding, it's about alignment of
| drives/intentions.
|
| Humans who are arseholes have drives and understandings
| that are vey human and reasonably understandable, but
| they're arseholes nonetheless simply because these drives
| are in a bit of a conflict with what others around them
| would like to and they don't care much about the desires
| of others - just like most cats.
| detritus wrote:
| Illiterality gets me nowhere.
| hyko wrote:
| Animals do get lost.
|
| On to the next article that takes a fallacy and makes it an
| axiom.
| Fargren wrote:
| You are reading the title as "Why animals don't _ever_ get lost
| ". That's one way to read the title. It can also be interpreted
| as "Why animals don't _often_ get lost ", or in other words,
| "What mechanisms do animals use to avoid getting lost." Which
| is an interesting question.
| enriquto wrote:
| Their interpretation of the title seems the normal one, yours
| is very convoluted, like aspiring to some sort of plausible
| deniability.
|
| If the title was "Why people from country X are thiefs.",
| that would be very insulting to people from X. If the article
| turned out to be about why some people from X become thiefs,
| the title would be very misleading.
| hyko wrote:
| Yes, you're also right - that's a good way to explain it.
| meowface wrote:
| A closer analogy would be "Why people from country X steal"
| ("get lost" and "steal" are action statements), which,
| while initially a bit suspicious upon first look, isn't
| necessarily insulting.
|
| "Why people from country X steal - [Opening sentence] Due
| to unprecedented levels of corruption and cruelty by their
| new tyrannical government, a third of the population is
| starving from man-made famines, leaving many country Xians
| no choice but to steal food from markets and risk one form
| of death to avoid another."
|
| Still not great, since it's a negative statement, but not
| necessarily xenophobic. An even closer analogy would be
| something positive like "Why people from country X ski so
| well". I don't imagine there'd be many complaints,
| probably.
|
| In my opinion, the headline's perfectly fine and clear.
| hyko wrote:
| Yes, you're right - thanks for pointing this out.
| k__ wrote:
| My cats often got lost for weeks, because they crawled into
| basements and couldn't get out.
| omginternets wrote:
| I admittedly haven't read the article, but this seems fishy.
| Surely some animals aren't trying to go anywhere specific?
|
| "You gotta be careful if you don't know where you're going
| because you might never get there."
|
| - Yogi Berra
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(page generated 2021-04-03 23:01 UTC)