Written and Edited by Cody Foo

Wayfinding has been a part of human navigation since people began roaming the world and expanding their territories. The ancient Greeks and Romans started using signs with symbols, rather than using the stars as was custom at the time. Polynesians mastered methods of wayfinding to explore and settle on the islands of the Pacific, many using devices such as the Marshall Islands stick chart. With these skills, some of them were even able to successfully navigate the ocean in addition to their own land.

However, wayfinding is not a human-exclusive technique for navigating, animals of all kinds use wayfinding, from bees using landmarks to find their way home, to birds and sea turtles using the Earth's magnetic field to make their annual migration. Let's look at how some of these animals move within nature.

Bees are vital to our environment given that they continually cross-pollinate crops, allowing humans to produce large amounts of food. It is said that without bees, we as humans would struggle to survive. So how do bees find honey, their hive, and their way around in general? According to Menzel et al (2005) bees use individual "orientation routes" to learn about their surroundings, and then relay this information to the other worker bees. Using elements such as the sun, distance, paths and landmarks, bees are thought to build up a kind of mind map in understanding the relation of the hive to these landmarks.

Ants are another type of insect that always seems to know where they're going; they never seem to crash into each other even when there are hundreds around, and they always seem to have a clear mission and direction. Kohler and Wehner (2005) studied desert ants and found that ants establish outbound and inbound routes, guiding them across their foraging areas. The route-based memories are acquired during the first runs from the nest. Even if the ants are displaced they can find their routes at any place and then follow them home, like human roads. Ants leave behind pheromones that can then be picked up by other members of their colony. Additionally, they can smell in two directions with their antennae and use this trait for navigational purposes.

Besides insects, there are many species of animal that use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate. While the exact method used by each animal is different (and still not totally understood by scientists), animals that are responsive to the geomagnetic field are able to orient themselves like we would with a compass. This allows them to not only find their migratory routes, but also allows predators like foxes to hunt their prey more accurately, using the geomagnetism like a range finder.

References:

Menzel, R., Greggers, U., Smith, A., Berger, S., Brandt, R., Brunke, S., Bundrock, G., Hülse, S., Plümpe, T., Schaupp, F., Schüttler, E., Stach, S., Stindt, J., Stollhoff, N., & Watzl, S. (n.d.). Honey bees navigate according to a map-like spatial memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(8), 3040–3045. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0408550102

Kohler, M., & Wehner, R. (2005). Idiosyncratic route-based memories in desert ants, Melophorus bagoti: How do they interact with path-integration vectors? Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 83(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2004.05.011

Magnetoreception | The Lohmann Lab – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (n.d.). https://lohmannlab.web.unc.edu/magnetoreception/