The final frontier, Ken Cheng rules
Music “Count the Minutes” by Private Joker
[tags]Dave Brodbeck, Algoma University, Spatial Memory, Animal Cognition, Psychology[/tags]
That title should be self explanatory…
That title should be self explanatory…
The final frontier, Ken Cheng rules
Music “Count the Minutes” by Private Joker
[tags]Dave Brodbeck, Algoma University, Spatial Memory, Animal Cognition, Psychology[/tags]
So I’m guessing you like hockey?
There are periodically stories in the news about how light pollution is causing birds to get lost. Is there anything to that, or don’t we know?
Yeah I have to like hockey, it is in the Canadian constitution, if you don’t they take your passport….
I would not be surprised if there was something to that. I imagine that birds navigate with the stars and the sun (nobody really knows, though there is a recent paper, I think I mentioned, that said that birds can probably see the magnetic field of the earth). Even if the magnetic stuff turns out to be true (which fits with a bunch of other stuff) the other types of info are also important. Indeed, nature is full of stuff that involves multiple redundant sources of info all pointing in the same direction. (Frankly if it was not for the idea of multiple redundant sources of info, I would never have got a PhD, but that is another story…)
(Boy I used a lot of parentheses in this comment…)
Thanks! I guess that if, in fact, the earth’s magnetic field reverses in the near future (as some scientists are speculating may happen), we’ll find out how much migrating animals rely on them. (Of course, “near future” in geologic terms…we, personally, probably won’t find out.)
Even if it shifts they wil learn, I imagine that it is not dissimilar a mechanism to what we see in Tunisian ants, like I mentioned in the class. They learn the pattern of the stars, the birds will learn the pattern of the magnetic field. As it is pretty constant within an animal’s lifetime, I would not worry much.