This thread has been fascinating. There was this discovery last year that Burmese pythons have some sort of "internal GPS" that allows them to travel in straight line over a distance exceeding 20 miles in the marshes of Florida. As is the case in most of these things, scientists don't understand how they do this. Here is one news article on this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/20/florida-scientists-deadly... Thank you Landon Noll for sharing your wonderful encounter. naeem On Thu, 26 Mar 2015, Henry Baker wrote:
Hmmmm... Insects & birds (aka dinosaurs) & fish (salmon, etc.) have these incredible ocean navigational capabilities.
Weren't there periods in the Earth's history where the ice caps were all melted, and the oceans were higher (=> less dry land) than today ?
Such navigational abilities might have been ubiquitous, because most species would have needed them to survive.
Only dry-land non-flying animals wouldn't need these abilities, so they might have been lost.
If some of these abilities can be correlated with certain stretches of DNA, perhaps some non-functioning stretches of such DNA might still exist in mammals (including humans) ?
At 09:37 AM 3/26/2015, Dan Asimov wrote:
It's interesting that some butterflies migrate many thousands of miles and back, taking something like 5 generations to complete. I find that feat of navigation even more astonishing.
I was going to mention < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly_migration#Range_of_the_migrat... >, but decided that this is more authoratative and detailed: < http://www.monarchbutterflyfund.org/node/148 >.
--Dan
On Mar 25, 2015, at 9:44 AM, Fred Lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote: . . . . . . how did migratory birds manage to acquire the same capability?
On 3/25/15, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I heard a recent program on the ability of ancient Polynesians to navigate the Pacific Ocean w/o clocks/longitude or GPS. . . . . . .
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