When We Talk About Animals · Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School

Ep. 21 – David Barrie on the wonders of animal navigation

·1 hr·2 clips

African dung beetles use the Milky Way to roll dung balls in straight lines at night.

1. When We Talk About Animals, Ep. 21 examines David Barrie's Supernavigators through pigeons, dung beetles, migratory birds, and human wayfinding. 2. Hosts Viveka Morris and Lindsay Stern interview Barrie, a former British diplomat, Royal Institute of Navigation fellow, sailor, and author of Sextant. 3. Barrie's core thesis is that animal navigation combines multiple sensory systems and can exceed human unaided abilities, while GPS and light pollution reduce human attention to nature. 4. Sahara desert ants use polarized sunlight, step counting, turns, landmarks, wind, scent, and possibly Earth's magnetic field to return across distances reaching 100 meters. 5. Homing pigeons can return from unfamiliar locations roughly 200 or 300 miles away, with evidence implicating landmarks, magnetic sensing, sunlight, smell, and possibly infrasound. 6. Eric Warrant and Marie Dacke found African dung beetles using moonlight polarization and the Milky Way, confirmed through cardboard hats and planetarium experiments. 7. Kaspar Thorup's white-crowned sparrow study displaced adult and juvenile birds about 3,000 miles east, with adults correcting southwestward and juveniles continuing south. 8. Ken Lohman's turtle research and Warrant's bogong moth fieldwork show scientists testing magnetic navigation through beach observations, tethered flight simulators, and manipulated magnetic fields. 9. Barrie says 60% of Europeans and 80% of North Americans cannot see the Milky Way, while GPS reliance can cause navigational brain circuits to shrink. 10. Best for listeners interested in animal behavior, navigation, astronomy, and Indigenous ecological knowledge.

As heard by us

Pigeons, desert ants, and migratory birds make navigation feel stranger than human instruments suggest.

Animal navigation becomes a quiet challenge to human certainty here, moving from pigeons released in unfamiliar places to Sahara desert ants crossing salt pans by the fastest route home.

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Why you'd press play

You want to know how a desert ant crosses scorching North African salt pans and still finds the fastest route back to its nest.

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