COWS WITH COMPASS

COWS WITH COMPASS


I have tried to use Google Earth, but haven't had much success. I incline to wander, and most of the time end up a long way away from where I set out to go.

But there are people who put it to good use, such as Begall and other scientists of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. They used Google to look at satellite photos of cows.

And why did they do that?

Well, Previous research had shown that animals such as birds, turtles and salmon migrate using a sense of magnetic direction, and small mammals such as rodents and a bat species also had a magnetic compass. It also helped that their co-author Hynek Burda had completed a ground-breaking work on African mole-rats.

Well, those scientists wanted to see if bigger mammals also have that sense of direction, "Our first idea was to study sleeping directions of humans (e.g. when doing camping), but there are too many constraints," Begall says.So they chose to look at about 8510 cattle in 308 locations around the world.They also looked at data on 2,974 deer that came from direct ground observations and photos in the Czech Republic.

Okay, what did they find?

They found that the deer and cattle almost always aligned to the magnetic North-South axis, thereby proving that they have an inner magnetic compass. So if you get lost in a forest, don't go round in circles, just look at the cows and deer, they will show you the North-South Axis. But which is south and which is north? That, unfortunately, is not clear. The researchers could not distinguish between head and rear for many of the cows because of low image resolutions in Google Earth.

By the way, I think they should have tried to look at the infra-red images of us sleeping here, most of us follow our Sastras and sleep North-South, right? Except my son, of course, who likes to wheel around in bed, like the two hands of a clock.

You can read all about this at http://www.livescience.com/animals/080825-magnetism-cows.html