Shearwaters know the direction and distance home but fail to encode intervening obstacles after free-ranging foraging trips.

ABSTRACT: While displacement experiments have been powerful for determining the sensory basis of homing navigation in birds, they have left unresolved important cognitive aspects of navigation such as what birds know about their location relative to home and the anticipated route. Here, we analyze the free-ranging Global Positioning System (GPS) tracks of a large sample (n = 707) of Manx shearwater, Puffinus puffinus, foraging trips to investigate, from a cognitive perspective, what a wild, pelagic seabird knows as it begins to home naturally. By exploiting a kind of natural experimental contrast (journeys with or without intervening obstacles) we first show that, at the start of homing, sometimes hundreds of kilometers from the colony, shearwaters are well oriented in the homeward dir

SUBMITTER: Padget O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6815147 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature