Mole Rats
Mole Rats are strange critters. If you ever saw the wonderful Errol Morris film:
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, one of the people he interviewed was Dr. Ray Mendez who specializes in Mole Rats.
Now some other people have found that the Mole Rat has a remarkable way to navigate through its tunnel warrens -- the Earth's Magnetic Field.
From the
New Scientist:
Mole rat's magnetic magic revealed
The blind mole rat continually monitors its direction using the Earth's magnetic field when it makes long underground journeys, new research has revealed. It is the first animal discovered to have this talent.
Blind mole rats have no eyes and spend most of their time burrowing in subterranean tunnels. They often have to make long journeys from their nests to find food and yet are able to find their way efficiently through complex mazes of tunnels.
They use signals such as smell and balance to check their direction and progress over short distances. But scientists have now discovered that on longer routes they combine this information with constant reference checks of the Earth's magnetic field.
"On long journeys with many twists and turns, it's easy to get lost by relying only on internal signals. We found that the mole rats used the external reference of the Earth's magnetic field as an additional tool," says Tali Kimchi, at Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Very cool! The sense of direction is a curious sense -- despite usually taking the long way around when driving somewhere, I generally have a good sense of which way is North in areas I spend time in. When we visited Jen's family last Thanksgiving, while driving around I generally got North and South correct but I would frequently flip East and West. After about five days there, I started to get it correctly most of the time. This is not just at her folks house, we were driving quite a bit.
Posted by DaveH at January 21, 2006 10:56 PM