
Take a second…Stop and think • What is the name of the street you live on? • Where are your favourite shops? • Where is the local beach you like to swim at? • Can you find your way to your friends house?
METHODS USED BY ANIMALS TO nAVIGATE BY MCKENSIE, MARCIA, FAITH AND EMILY
Visual clues • Well, animals aren’t that different, they learn their surroundings just as we learn or streets, shops, hills and rivers of our homeland. • You may want to write this next bit down…
Visual clues • Birds that migrate learn the shape of coastline and other topography of their route. • Other animals learn where streams and food trees lie, and most know objects that point to home. • For example, a digger wasp always memorises the landmarks around its burrow.
Now it’s time for a game of ‘what is it?’ • What 2007 movie, starring Nicole Kidman, involved me in the title? • I am a tool used for working out directions • I am traditionally round and could fit in the palm of your hand. • You could probably find me as an app. • Unscramble these letters to get what I am o-m-p-s-a-s-c
Did you guess? I’m a compass!
Solar navigation • The sun appears to move from east to west during the day, so can be used to tell direction if you were to have a clock. Many birds and other animals, e.g. honeybees, use the sun as a built in compass which suggests they have a built in clock. • Large migratory birds, e.g. ducks, hawks, and geese, fly mainly in daytime and presumably use the sun as a compass.
Solar navigation • In autumn a northern-hemisphere bird flies south at an angle of 45°left of the sun at 9 am, and at an angle of 45°to the right of the sun at 3 pm. • When such a bird has its internal clock retarded 6 hours by being place in artificial light/ dark cycles and its then released outside, it sees the 3 pm sun as if it was 9 am, and flies due west. • Diagram Page 57 Textbook
Stop! It’s acrostic Poem Time Magnificant Attraction Grippy Net Force Energy Tin? Invented by a Scottish person Clingy
Magnetic Fields • One of the many methods used by homing pigeons is to follow the magnetic field lines of the earth, much like a compass. • If a magnet deflecting the normal magnetic field is in someway attched to the bird of a homing pigeon, the bird can be made to fly off course y the same degree of deflection.
Magnetic field cont. • However, on a clear day the birds will use other navigational skills, for examples sun compasses and visual landmarks,by doing so most manage to get home. • It isn’t just birds that use the magnetic field lines of the earth. Whales, dolphins, and even bacteria, are known to have minature magnetic compasses.