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Animal navigation is the ability of many animals to find their way accurately without maps or instruments. Birds such as the Arctic tern , insects such as the monarch butterfly and fish such as the salmon regularly migrate thousands of miles to and from their breeding grounds, [ 1 ] and many other species navigate effectively over shorter ...
Biologists have long wondered whether migrating animals such as birds and sea turtles have an inbuilt magnetic compass, enabling them to navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. Until late in the 20th century, evidence for this was essentially only behavioural : many experiments demonstrated that animals could indeed derive information from ...
Electroreceptive animals use the sense to locate objects around them. This is important in ecological niches where the animal cannot depend on vision: for example in caves, in murky water, and at night. Electrolocation can be passive, sensing electric fields such as those generated by the muscle movements of buried prey, or active, the ...
Trophallaxis: eating food regurgitated by another animal; Zoopharmacognosy: self-medication by eating plants, soils, and insects to treat and prevent disease. An opportunistic feeder sustains itself from a number of different food sources, because the species is behaviourally sufficiently flexible.
Ocean currents moving in the magnetic field of the Earth also generate electric fields that sharks can use for orientation and possibly navigation. [26] Among teleosts, the electric catfish uses electroreception to navigate through muddy waters. These fish make use of spectral changes and amplitude modulation to determine factors such shape ...
Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food require both energy and time. To maximize fitness, an animal adopts a foraging strategy that provides the most benefit (energy) for the lowest cost, maximizing the net energy gained. OFT helps predict the best strategy that an animal can use to achieve ...
Some animals may make navigational errors and end up in the wrong location. If they successfully breed in these new sites, the animal will have widened its breeding base which may ultimately increase the species' chances of survival. Other, unknown means of navigation may be involved, and further research is needed.
Echolocating animals emit calls and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects. Echolocation is used for navigation, foraging, and hunting prey. Echolocation calls can be frequency modulated (FM, varying in pitch during the call) or constant frequency ...