How do Animals Map the World?

and and it just becomes this quagmire. So in this episode we are stripping away a lot of the human complexity and we're looking at the animal complexity when it comes to maps, because you won't find a lot of physical maps that have been drawn by like an elephant or a beetle. But as far as we know, as far as we know, they may not actually create maps, but there is mapping going on because because humans were

mapping before they actually made the maps. If we discussed so we have the we have the neural architecture for mapping. It's part of how we or any animal moves through a three dimensional world full of fixed and movable objects. It's just part of our navigational system. Yeah, and there are similar similarities between humans and animals, but you could argue that animals have a much more sophisticated system than humans.

And in fact, the term cognitive mapping was the first used to describe the superior maze solving abilities of lab rats. You know, we think about that term in terms of humans, but that is not so Uh. It is these guys that really helped us to understand how very well they can navigate space. Right, So let's talk about the similarities in the way that humans and animals navigate. For starters, and something we discussed in one of our previous episodes,

horizontal vertical neurons. We are we when it comes to like a chessboard, we are nearly more similar to the rook the little castle that moves up and down side to side. Like that's what we understand the most. Uh. Throw in the movements of a queen or a bishop that's going diagonal, and uh, we're not as we're not as hardwired to catch those movements into into move in

that way in our head. Yeah, they're stealthie moves to us, right, And the reason for that is because we have these sack codes or eye movements, this machinery that really tracks well on this X y axis. And it's the same for other animals. Um. And it really makes sense for us land lovers, animals and humans because think about our coordinates that we deal with all the time. We deal with these really vertical trees and this really horizontal landscape.

So it would make sense that that's how we are oriented. Uh, let's say and co paris into something like a sephalopod like a squid, in which the coordinates are very different underwater in the deep and they don't need that sort of X y orientation which we've talked about before. Like how incredible it is that they can navigate their space.

If you if you need any proof that humans live them at X y axis, uh, certainly try doing some eye exercises where you roll your eye like like the hands of the clock, and you'll find that it's that diagonal space in between in between the the twelve and the three, in between the three and the six, that's where you're gonna find a little strain unless you've been using I exercises regularly, which you know some people do.

I suppose we all should really it's just pain. You're right, then when I do it in a circle, I can really see, but when I go up and down and side to side, it's much clear. Uh. So there you go. That's that's one of the similarities that we have with other animals, at least land dwelling animals. And then we have something called path integration. Yes, path integration in a sense backtracking. Uh. The example that comes to mind with the path integration is you fly somewhere you've never been

to before. You're on vacation, and basically someone drove you to the hotel, so you have no real idea of where you are, but you still I guarantee it. If you you're in say you're a you're in a hotel in Bangkok. You can step out the door. You can look at the end of the street and we're like, oh, there's a place where I can buy a newspaper. You can go get that newspaper, and then you can look down the other street and you're like, oh, there's a

place that's selling mangoes. Go buy a mango, and then you'll be able to get back to your hotel, either by backtracking or by taking um a different course, like you'll you'll have in your head this map of the places you've been and where you are in reference to the place you came from. Yeah. Ken Jennings and his

book Map Head talks about this. He talks about being in d C and going to all these different museums there and then going back to the Metro the train system, and saying, you know, they didn't retrace their steps through these five different museums, basically looked at where the sun was and where the train was and said, okay, we think we can make our way back there. And of course animals do a similar thing, but much in a much better way than we do, or a more direct way.

In fact, you can look at an ant and see it roaming around for two hundred meters just kind of randomly meandering foraging for food, and then once it finds food, it takes an absolute direct path back to the beginning of where it was. Um. Such is their homing device in their in their heads. You brought up landmarks, and that's another core thing that both humans and their fellow

animals you used to navigate. In fact, we've had studies which have shown that that fish even can use landmarks to to navigate the world around them and to reorient themselves when they've been taken out of one environment a bit a large environment and putting a smaller one, or vice versa. And we've seen um each species like jay's and nutcrackers, their foragers who tuck away their food in

thousands of different places, relying heavily on landmarks. Another good example are whales in the Pacific who are traveling toward North America on the west coast. I mean they the whole continent of North America is essentially a landmark, and that establishes where they're going to take their turn. And then of course there's the position of the sun, which

plays into our circadian rhythms. Are this this understanding on a biological level about what the what the cycle of the solar cycle it's doing, what the lunar cycle is doing, and so we're able to determine where we are in relation to the regular setting and rising of the sun. Yeah. And so of course animals and some birds can even travel at night using the sun, and the theory is that they take the reading from where the sun sets

and then uses that to set their course. And then others think that the polarization of light coming from the sun place role as well. Of course, this is all stuff that we have in common with animals. There's a bunch of other things that animals used that that we just don't have access to, things like scent um, even the like a bees waggle. Yes, yeah, we're not. We're not so good at using the waggle to navigate. I've tried,

but nobody knows what I'm talking about. Of course, one of the big differences in the ways that the humans navigate the world and animals navigate the world our our ability, or in our case, our inability to detect the Earth's magnetic field and navigate the world by it. Um. We discussed in the past when we're talking about bats, we talked about magnetite, which is this uh magnetic substance in the bat that allows it to detect there's magnetic field.

Humans have it in their bodies as well, but we're not really able to do anything with it. Um. Other animals can do really amazing things with it, such as the loggerhead turtle. Yeah, these are pretty famous because they hatch and then they make a ten year, eight thousand miles circuit. Of the North Atlantic returning back to Florida, um where they hatched from. And they are very sensitive

to the magnetic fields that the Earth has. Yeah, I think ever like nine thousand miles thousand kilometers before they return, and it's a it's believed that they create this mental magnetic map in their their heads based on the angle of magnetic field and intensity in the areas that they travel through. Yeah. In fact, there have been some experiments.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had some researchers who actually through the turtles off course, but then the turtles were able to find their way back with

very little difficulty. And they think, again, this is the magnetic fields, the lines that they're following, and then um believing that some magnetic orienting was going on, the next experiment subjected the turtles to a variety of magnetic fields that differed from the Earth's natural field, and of course the turtles went off course again and exposure to a magnet that mimic the Earth's field set them right again.

So this is proof that the turtles can the tech that earth magnetic field and then use it to navigate, which I think is fashionating it because to me, this is like a superpower that which do not possess. Now that magnetite I mentioned, the crystals of magnetite have been found in various creatures. It's even been found in some bacteria.

You'll find in the brains of bees and termites, fish, um again, humans, though it's not only doing anything there, and in birds, most notably in the beaks of pigeons. Humming pigeons. Yeah, humming pigeons, of course we know are are wonderful at navigating and have been used by humans quite a bit for that purpose. But the studies do suggest that the bird's sense the magnetic field independent of their motion and posture, and that they can identify their

geographical position. Now, the reason why researchers are really interested as well this this pigeon type receptor system is that nanotechnologists are really interested in learning more for accurate drug delivery systems based on this receptor system. And I also wanted to point out that they think that this this magnetite could be a universal feature of all birds, which would help solve this mystery of why they can navigate so well. Because we know, of course, the magnetite helps

the magnetic fields, the sun's position. But there are also other things going on, like scent. Yes, And before we get into scent, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we will talk about navigating the world around you with maps made out of smell. All right, we're back maps, smell maps. Yes, so you know, to a certain city. We've talked before about as humans, where we're just walking through the streets of our lives, walking

through our daily environments. Even if we're not actively thinking about the map around us, our our mind is forming a map based on the information that's coming in and the things we're experiencing. So to a certain extent, we may form a smell map. We may know what parts of the office are smelly, which parts smell like a strong air freshener, which parts they smell like doughnuts, depending

on the time of the day. So to a certain extent, we have a very limited smell bat But it's nothing like the smell maps that some of the animals out

there used to navigate the world. Ye I was just thinking about when I lived in midtown Atlanta and on a Sunday morning, I would take a walk around and I always wanted to do a scratch and sniff map, because there's you know, an area that has a lot of bars in it, and you know, there were very distinct areas that Yeah, there's always mixed alcohol and the gutter stink, yeah, and the bleach trying to clean the sidewalks New Orleans e yes, pop, Yeah, but yeah, that

doesn't that kind of pales in comparison to an animal's ability to smell an entire habitat it's flying over. Now. Obviously, we have animals such as ants that famously use sent trails to navigate. They you know, you see them marching in their lines leaf cutter ants, for instance, and they're marching from one place of the other. They're just following the cent trail left by the guy in front of you.

And you can manipulate that cent trail to spell out your name, to to lead them off course, to to to do all sorts of um, I guess, kind of mean things to the poor leafcutter ants who are just trying to get stuff done and and conduct their agricultural experiment underground. Oh you're just delaying them, yeah, because they're they're they're going to get the stuff. They're they're determined. But but yeah, So, so there's that model simply following

cent trails. But but then there's some slightly more complex methods as well. Yeah, because what do you do if you're an ant in the Sahara, for instance, because it's so windy and sandy, you're not gonna be able to pick up a scent, right. Um. So there's a Swiss zoologist by the name of Rudiger Juaner, and he altered ants paces by putting them on tiny stilts. Ants on stilts made of individual pig bristles. And he did this for a reason, not not just to start a little

ant circus um. He wanted to know how their pace informed their ability to navigate. So what he found is that when he put the ants on stilts, it really altered their pace, and they overshot their destinations by a pretty big margin, which then pointed to him that that ants are actually doing a sort of mental math math

calculation with their steps. It was pretty fascinating. And that we had mentioned the waggle another way that other animals communicate directions, right, These are the bees that communicate by by shaking their their hinders and doing a little dance. The dance of the bees, which is more than just a celebration of their of their their honey base life,

but but actually a communicative gesture. Yeah, they share geographic information like the direction of the food sources relative to the sun, the distance, and then the quality of that food source, which I thought was really interesting. There was I think there was an old there was an old Donald Duck cartoon where he dressed up like a b to uh, to steal their honey. And I can't recall if he actually did some waggling. He did some waggling, for sure, because hey, he's Donald and he's got this

big fake stinger on his his hinder there. But but I want to say that he did a little waggling in as a b communicative measure as well. Well, and I do kind of remember, but the donc donc waggle that he has anyway, so sort of a natural thing. It's funny how in kids stories there's so many plots involving another creature trying to pretend like it is honey bee or some other thing trying to steal honey. It's

a big deal. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a it's one of the classic stories, right, The bear trying to steal the bee's honey. I mean it's a cautionary tale too, right, because there's something that the bee has, the human or the bear or the duck wants it, and it's gonna risk getting stung if it tries to steal it. So that's right, Which is the whole point of children's books anyway, right, their instructive Um, All right, let's take everybody out here with a couple of other

amazing examples of how animals navigate. First of all, there is this creature called the frill fin gobie, which is a little fish. It sounds like it could be a Middle Earth inhabitant theath yeah, or it does sound like a hobbits name, or maybe a dwarf. But but what's what's amazing about this little crater Well, it's a small tropical fish and it's found in rocky pools along the Atlantic shore, and all that is you know, pretty like, okay, pretty wrote information. Um, But this is the really cool

thing about this fish. If a tidal pool that it's in becomes really low or predator shows up, the fish can eject itself straight up into the water and into another tidal pool with great accuracy, and it can do this six successive times until it can find a tidal pool that doesn't have a predator in it or seems safe.

And what scientists think is that because these fish have had an opportunity during high tide to explore that they have been able to make a mental map of all these different title pools that they can work with in these situations, because jumping from one title pool to the next, I mean, that's that's a dangerous proposition if you don't have a clear idea that there is going to be a title pool there and then have some idea of what's gonna be in it, right, yeah, exactly right. What's

the term out of the frying pan into the fire? Yeah, yeah, um. And then there's the Manx shearwaters. This is a kind of bird. Yeah, These guys are pretty amazing. They regularly migrate well over ten thousand kilometers to South America in the winter, uh, where they use the waters off southern Brazil and Argentina. So you'll have some of these older birds that have clocked some phot somewhere the neighborhood of eight million kilometers five million miles during the course of

its lifetime, like you anytime I think about that. Um in terms of any bird migration, you know, you think they're they're they're humans that spend large portions of their time never leaving a particularly area, and in many cases lived their entire lives within a very um fixed space. And then you have these birds that are just true globe quatters. Globe quatters, they are true globetrotters, you know. Uh yeah, And actually I'm gonna tell you this story

about a shearwater. Now when I tell you the story, you try to imagine yourself as this shearwater. Okay um. In nineteen fifty three, British ornithologists RM Lockley asked his friend in London to take two Manx shearwaters on a plane from London to Boston with him a commercial it's a commercial flight, it was I think you pretty much

do anything. Um. It's only one of the shearwaters survived. Uh. And when they got to the Boston Boston Slogan Airport, his friend set the bird free, which is what the ornithologists wanted him to do. So the friend wrote to Lockley to tell him what he had done, and then twelve days later and thirty miles later, the Shearwater returned

to London ahead of the letter. So this is amazing to me because can you imagine someone stuffing you on a plane and not having any context of where you are, being taken to another location again without any sort of data about where the sun is, any sort of landmarks sent, and then being able to find your way home. Yeah.

I would just like the first thing I would have to do is just climb a tree so that the wolves wouldn't eat me, you know, just like climb up there and maybe they'll find my body and only that my eyes will be done. So that's your strategy to climb a tree. Pretty much. My sense of direction is not that good, so you know, you can actually increase that. There have been studies that say that the people can increase their their sense of direction and their ability to

to navigate better. It's just practice practice. Yeah, okay, well there's hope for me. Maybe maybe I won't just climb the tree and die. Maybe I'll look around. No, no Map boot camp for you. I think Map boot camp. I'm trying to imagine people showing up from Matt boot Camp, Like the instructions will have to be pretty like they basically need to send a bus to your house to get you because because otherwise it's just no one's gonna

show up. It's gonna be like three guys showing up for five minutes late, and they're like, where my goodness, I had the GPS and everything, and and now I'm I barely survived. I think this would make a great reality show. All right, Well, there's just some quick insight into the animal world of maps. How animals navigate the world informed these Uh then it may it be a physical map, but they're certainly forming these elaborate mental maps

of the world around them. So hopefully in these three podcasts that we've we've done to to cover maps, you you have a different view of what a map means. Well, not only what it means on paper, but what it means in the mind of the the human or animal that conceived it. Indeed, in how much animals and humans are alike in many ways in navigating this world. All right, if you have something you would like to share with us about maps, your experience with maps, your experience with animals.

I know some of you guys out there are dog or cat owners, and you may have some miraculous stories about dogs or cats that have disappeared for a little bit and come back, or or have made of a long journey from and from their current home to a previous home, that sort of thing. Everyone loves those stories, so let us know about them. We'd be happy to read if you want to air. You can find us

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