Learning about the navigational feats of animals | Hacker News Reader

Learning about the navigational feats of animals

newyorker.com

100 pointsgmays90 comments

I don't know how far the cat got, but I had a similar experience with moving into a new house. The previous owners had to leave without the cat because it mysteriously left about a week before they had to move and didn't show back up.

Three weeks later, a very scrawny cat showed up at my door and wouldn't leave. I let it in and fed it and then got in contact with the previous owners. They drove two hours back to get the cat. The wife was beside herself with joy. The husband told me quietly he'd hoped he'd never see the cat again. Sorry, buddy.

We lost our cat and months later got a call from the shelter.

The neighbor down and around the corner had saved him from his dog and brought him in. They IDed him from the chip.

Later at the vet, they told us cats can get lost being only a few houses away.

I imagine it's a whole different perspective seeing things from one foot off the ground.

Yeah, I'm sure I read a year or two back that Cats have an odd sense of direction in which they don't 'join up' different paths - say, that from out of the front of a building, to that out of the back.

Rings true with a cat we have in our building here which simply cannot register that the back door has access for it, so waits out front no matter how inclement the weather.

Mind you, it IS a cat - so likely purposefully being an arsehole for some particular reason.

To be fair, I know lots of people who will walk 2 sides of a triangle because they know how to get from A to B and A to C, but just don't have a sense that B and C are rather close. I think they feel there's probably a shortcut between B and C, but they just don't have the sense of direction to just walk in the general direction from B toward C until things start looking familiar.

I also can't count the number of times I've argued with someone about the direction to walk because their phone's compass is off in a dense urban environment. They insist on walking the direction they think Google Maps is telling them to walk, only to have the whole map spin after walking half a block when the compass gets its bearings. I've seen the same person dumbfounded several times by this.

I’ve done that in myself in Manhattan. I always travel there by train and would take a circuitous route by train, only to realize when driving last year that I was like a 10 minute walk away!

When I first got to MIT, some students told me how to get to CambridgeSide Galleria mall: either walk to the Keandall/MIT T (subway) station and wait 20 minutes for the free shuttle bus to the mall, or take the red line, switch to the green line in central Boston, and head out to Lechmere station. The mall is a few minutes' walk from Lechmere station.

I took the free shuttle bus once, and realized the mall is 5 to 10 minutes by foot from the MIT/Kendall T station. I don't know how you make several runs by shuttle bus to get a few things for your dorm/fraternity room and don't realize it's silly to wait for the bus. If the weather is bad, or you're coming back with a lot of things, that's one thing, but it's generally silly to wait for that shuttle bus. I knew more than one MIT student who thought it was a long way to the Galleria because of the long wait for the shuttle bus or the long T ride into Boston and back out. Of course, this was before smart phones, and I'm not even sure Yahoo maps were popular my freshman year, so these students probably never looked up the location of the Galleria a map.

I hate it when map apps spin. Just absolutely hampers any ability to develop a bigger picture idea of how you're navigating, and is terribly confusing when the app gets your heading wrong, as your friend found out.

I don't like self-orienting phone maps, but people who never learned to properly read a map are likely to have trouble with maps that don't self-orient. They're better off with self-orienting maps, even if the self-orienting map sometimes are incorrectly oriented.

Up is always north in my phone, and I’m always amazing how it trips people up

I know someone who freezes on trips in other countries when she enters an underground station and the map stops responding. She just doesn't understand why the magic stopped working. She is so dependant on Google maps that she doesn't trust herself anymore. I tried to explain GPS and satellites, but she is dense.

I've had android phones for 11 years. Every single one gets my orientation wrong when driving but stopped. If I'm at an intersection stopped, and open Maps, it thinks I'm pointing in the direction opposite my real orientation EVERY SINGLE TIME. On all the phones I've had, I swear to god there's a flag on my google account that was used 11 years ago and fogotten about that fixed a bad compass or something.

Both my wife's iPhone and my Android phone frequently have their compasses incorrect when woken.

I remember early Android phones showing a short animation when opening Google Maps, showing one how to move the wrist in a figure-eight motion to orient the compass.

I don't think there was a setting. I think they just got rid of the animation showing you how to fix the compass.

This condition can be present in humans too.

> Not to be confused with healthy individuals who have a poor sense of direction, individuals affected by DTD get lost in very familiar surroundings, such as their house or neighborhood, daily.

Someone who has it explained to me that seeing the same room from a different direction doesn’t even register as the same place.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographical_disorientation

Please stop perpetuating the myth that cats are "arseholes".

Cats, much like dogs, and every other non-human on the planet, have different drives and understandings than a human. Just because we aren't capable of fully understanding those drives isn't a reason to denigrate them.

The next time your cat does something that is outside of your understanding, please have a little compassion.

It's not about understanding, it's about alignment of drives/intentions.

Humans who are arseholes have drives and understandings that are vey human and reasonably understandable, but they're arseholes nonetheless simply because these drives are in a bit of a conflict with what others around them would like to and they don't care much about the desires of others - just like most cats.

Illiterality gets me nowhere.

And some humans apparently also completely lack a sense of tolerance for humourous criticisms of animals.

That sort of explains why my barn cat likes to spend a day going in one door of my house and out another. We do have a lot of exterior doors, so it's kind of like the Scooby Do hallway scene, but with an orange cat asking to come in and out.

That’s weird. We moved to a new house and I was surprised one morning to see the cat scratching the upper balcony door, waiting to be let in, even though he’d never used that particular door until that day. He seems to always wait by the door that’s closest to the nearest awaken human, regardless if he’s ever used that entrance.

i found a kitten crying under a car in front of my building 2 1/2 months ago. after i bathed him and fed him (he gulped down 3 helpings of food!), he set up camp like he owned the place, to the dismay of my dog and cat. i learned later he’d been outside for about 4 days.

i found the owner, who lived a couple blocks away, via his chip as well. she was in recovery from an accident and was reluctant to take him back, so i fostered him for 2 months. a couple days after i finally returned him to her, she tried to give him back to me (which i had initially suggested to do if she didn’t want him) due to misbehavior and prodded by an apathetic boyfriend. but after reassuring her and talking through training ideas, she kept him and so far has been happy with that decision. he’s a very energetic but also very loving little guy.

You're good people, clairity.

> he husband told me quietly he'd hoped he'd never see the cat again.

Do you suspect he's involved in the disappearance of the cat?

I'm not quite convinced that "animals don't get lost". How many lost cats never return for every one that does? Did anyone ever make a real study?

Also there are other questionable bits in the article for example "We now have geolocation devices light enough to be carried by monarch butterflies". Where are those devices described? For years I've been looking for a reliable GPS tracking for cats that don't require the use of a collar (which is a huge risk to a cat in dense vegetation). There is nothing on the market (that I know of) that would be available as a small wirelessly charged implant, or even better something tiny that could be attached to the fur like goosegrass pods.

I bet other outdoor cat owners would pay good money for devices like that, but other than a periodic kickstarter scam there is nothing.

I'm not convinced either, because there are cases of animals found after long periods of starvation when the animal probably knows it can find food at home. But it is possible that those animals are driven to hide in fear instead of braving a return to their home. Also the ones that never return may have just died instead of being truly lost. There lots of dangers out there. And there's also cases of theft.

I have a weird feeling when cats go missing they want a new home, or want to roam?

This is actually how we acquired our first cat. A cat just turned up at our door one day and basically moved in - we didn't feed her at first, but she slept and played with us (3 kids)

Eventually my parents managed to track down the actual owner, turns out the cat and her sister didn't get along too well in the same house, she only went there to eat.

The owner was more than happy for us to properly adobt her.

No clue why she chose us, but cats are territorial animals so it makes sense that they can just not like tho they're living with.

Monarch butterflies are tracked by tags, rather like ringing birds

Source https://monarchjointventure.org/faq/track-the-migration

Monarch butterflies are tracked by people, who use the unique identifiers on the passive tags to identify butterflies and record where they were spotted/captured. The tags themselves are no more than a sticker designed to stick to butterflies without impeding or harming them - they started making them in 1992, afterall.

GP is talking about active tags that get their coordinates by using GPS satellites and (I assume) phone home in some way.

As far as I'm aware you're right about the geolocation devices. This is a great podcast about a guy working on Project ICARUS, where they're working on tracking thousands and thousands of animals with small geolocation devices so we have much better data to work from - https://www.bigbiology.org/season-2#episode43. From what I recall the idea of tracking butterflies was something they were working on but hadn't cracked yet. I think it was towards the end of the podcast, but I'd recommend the whole thing.

I heard that most cats are actually found before they are lost, i.e. well-meaning people bringing them to an animal shelter while the cat would have been perfectly fine on their own. I can not say how they came to that conclusion (a guess: maybe by owners saying that it was perfectly normal for the cat to roam the same distances from home as when they were caught and brought to the shelter?)

I can definitely see how that could happen in many places,but very unlikely where I'm at. We don't even have a cat shelter in my area(dogs only - no idea why). Also, and that really pisses me off, people here are generally of the opinion every cat will happily survive on their own in the countryside which leads to people from cities abandoning unwanted cats (and dogs) here(this is how I got my first cat) . I even had a ridiculous situation of someone dropping two dogs in front of my property at 4am. The dogs had nowhere to go so they hanged around my place for two days (it was a weekend so I couldn't ring animal control). On the third day the same person came and picked the dogs back... I have no idea what such people think.

I understand. Abandoning pets is terrible but a rather visible thing. For each abandoned animal there must be lots of pets living good lives with people who actually care if this is a relief.

From what I read lots of people got pets during the pandemic to have company at home. I worry a bit what will happen to them once people can resume their regular lifestyles.

I have had probably more than a hundred cats throughout my childhood more than 13(kittens) at one given point. All my cats were outside/indoor cats free to go and come and I am convinced that the cats that would go out and not come back were either killed by dogs in the surrounding neighborhoods or simply didn't not want to come back. The cats that would not usually return were the older ones. If a younger cat did not return then I assumed it was dead.

We had given a few cats aways and they would sometimes come back home after a week or so. We lived on a mountain and my Aunt miles away in the valley and a cat we gave her came right back home. We gave away another few that did the same thing this time in even further locations.

Cats have personalities.

I'm sure you know this, but maybe have not considered it in this context.

There have been humans in my life I did not like, or who drove me bonkers. Perfectly good people, but just a personality conflict. Who's to say, that it isn't the same for some cats? Just a personality conflict, and so they seek life elsewhere.

And only a 100 years ago, most cats were farms cats, as most people lived in rural areas. Many cats were barn cats, familiar with humans, but mostly wild, living off of mice and other vermin.

Those genes don't vanish in 100 years. Maybe some of those older cats just preferred independence?

Male cats are usually the ones to go out and then come back in a few days, next time few weeks, then months... and then they disappear for good. I've never had a female cat go away like that.

Does that apply to neutered males?

Probably not, that would be my guess.

My neutered male cat sometimes disappeares but with exception of that one time I had to fetch him from the top of a 14m tall pine tree he always returns. My other cat (also a neutered male) never goes away for more than half a day.

> The cats that would not usually return were the older ones.

Cats that are about to die will often go off somewhere by themselves.

Well, I've worked on one such geolocation device about the size of a grain of rice, and that was 30 years ago. It was a tracking device started by a former Israeli military intelligence officer after his family was scattered in a terrorist attack and it was days before everyone could be accounted. This tracking device was the size of a pack of cigarettes' when in development, and by the time I left the company (late 1990) the company was being sold to the Israeli government and the device was the size of a grain of rice. It provided 3D location in an area via 3-way triangulation of telecommunication tower signals.

Small enough to be snuck into a vaccine dose and secretly injected!

We talkin’ basmati or sushi rice? And how was it powered?

It was basically a miniaturized pager, powered by a tiny military watch type battery. The device was an ASIC, application specific integrated circuit, and it sat on the battery like a little bead.

Presumably it is https://monarch.engin.umich.edu/ which isn't really a geolocation device, it's a environmental logger that can (apparently) be used to infer a track.

Every year thousans of birds, animals migrate thousand of kilometers and they do not lose their way. This is a proof they knows how to find their ways. It is understood that navigation has been taught and equipped for them.

Every year thousands of humans migrate thousands of kilometers without getting lost. That doesn’t mean humans can’t get lost.

There is a lot of survivorship bias in your assumption. How many animals fail to complete those migrations?

When I lived in an apartment in New York City, I had an indoor cat. One day I was talking to my neighbor with the door open and the cat peeked her head out, sniffing around. She was a stereotypical fraidy cat, always scared of everything, so when she walked out the door, I knew she wouldn't go far, especially when she walked up the stairs outside my apartment. I few minutes later I hear her meowing like crazy. I went up a flight of stairs to find her standing in front of the same exact door as mine, one flight up, meowing to get in.

This happens to my cat in Brooklyn. We walk with him up or down a flight of stairs to an identical-looking floor, and if any disturbance occurs on the other floor he runs to "our" door. We get a real kick out of his mistake.

We live three flights up but the cat will only go two flights up. I think it's because the cat only skips one floor, and he can't count, not even to two: he can only register one floor-skip.

(Star Trek the Wrath of Khan) Spock: He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.

The idea that humans are the worst navigators ever is rather silly. Humans who actually explore the world without being spaced out by their smartphone can roam and find their way back perfectly well.

But navigation is like a muscle, and most of us have allowed it to atrophy because it’s easy to just mindlessly follow what your GPS of choice tells you to do.

I don’t think the “humans can’t navigate” premise of this article would have passed as plausible a mere thirty years ago.

Huh? The article devotes several paragraphs talking about how good humans have been at navigating and lists multiple feats as evidence.

Quote:

> The second is that the creatures with a credible claim to being the worst navigators on the planet have steadily reduced the odds of all the others getting where they need to go, by interfering with their trajectories, impairing their route-finding abilities, and despoiling their destinations. Those feckless creatures are us, of course.

It's definitely a skill. I play minecraft infrequently with my brother in law and he can retrace his steps in the nether (and in the overworked) with complete ease. I in the other hand struggle.

I find if I go somewhere with my phone navigating, I have much less of a sense of how to backtrack. If I use written directions or a paper map, I can usually get back with little difficulty.

The problem for humans is that the need not to be lost has vanished with modern cities, public transport,and more recently, GPS. Most humans don't actively look for reference points when traveling. I remember going to pick mushrooms with my in-laws in a forest a few miles from their house. My mother in law was navigating it like Mowgli: she knew every single nook and cranny,the specific trees and exits into forest separation lines. I was lost there in 2 min, couldn't tell one tree from another and had no idea where north/south is. The difference between me and her is that she's been doing it for years and 'scans' the forest as soon as she walks in.

Even in the desert where the landscape in always infux with sand dunes, people used to travel the desert and they still do in Africa and the middle east, they look up the into the sky for stars etc.Beduens still do it there, they unril recently-used to travel either walking or in camel convoys from Syria to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. But when I got lost in the desert - car broke down- at dusk I had to wait walk, in the wrong direction as it turned out, untill sunset.

William Thesiger in his book recounts that the Bedouins he traveled with could also identify and navigate based on the shape of the dunes too, and they had memory and recognition of various dune landscapes from many, many places.

If I had to guess, I would suppose that they are not recognising specific dunes (which would be constantly changing), but patterns in the dunes caused by prevailing winds. I am sure there is something analogous to the Polynesian voyagers recognising patterns in the waves and currents of the ocean.

Dunes are changing much more slowly than you think. They are huge and heavy, and they can hold shape for decades.

Ha, my parents are like that, they love to pick mushrooms and they know their terrain and have pretty good orientation. I got lost a few times going with them and not keeping up or wandering off in the wrong direction. Luckily, I could hear their shouts.

My disabled aunt went regularly to Lourdes in France for some hopeful cure.

Once, at the moment to leave to the train station, the cat was nowhere to be found. Heartbroken she left her there, and took the train.

9 months later a dirty and skinny white cat stood in front of her door in the very north of France. The cat crossed the whole country!

I expect that if cat would somehow knew the shortest way back home it would arrive in less than 6 months.

What I googled was that cat average walking speed would be 3.3km/h. If a cat would walk for 6 hours a day it should cover like 20km a day. From Lourdes to Belgium it is like 1000km, when one selects walking path on google. With that in mind it should be something like 50 days or 2 months by shortest path.

For me that cat was badly lost, well being a cat you don't have restaurants but as in the first paragraph if it would not be lost I would expect it to come back in less than 6 months.

In the end it found its way but that would be the same for me if I take the wrong exit at the highway and I am 1 hour later, I was lost for that hour.

To be fair, taking time to stalk and kill prey, slow travel time.

Or take into account my fledging memory. This is an old story, and 6 months or 9 months didn't make a big difference until now and this math. Will ask my aunt.

When I read your comment I thought that yes I probably underestimate how much it takes to hunt for food if you are a house cat, hungry for couple of days. Because one does not get 100% hit when hunting.

So it would be more like I knew where to go but I had to take that highway exit because I badly had to use the toilet. Maybe those 9 months would be quite right.

How is this possible? What was the signal that told the cat it was going in the right or wrong direction?

If she travelled with the cat it might have picked up all the scents along the way, but I'm not sure if cats are even capable of doing that.

Or better: the cat snuck into a familiarly smelling train and got out at the right stop.

We used to move back and forth every few months between two cities 1500km apart. Our cat could tell if he was in any of those two cities - he would suddenly start meowing, wanting to get out of the car.

He was very consistent in this. He wouldn't do that when we were driving through any other city.

> ask [people] to walk across a field toward a target, and then conceal the target after they start moving, they will stray off course in approximately eight seconds

In sea kayak navigation you quickly learn the importance of observing your reciprocal heading, the bearings of visible landmarks, and paying attention to wind direction relative to your heading. That works on land too, but people aren’t inclined to be that observant unless taught and a habit formed.

The article is full of fascinating trivia, but the point about geese that overwinter in your local park having missed out on a migration as a gosling and thus never learned how to navigate to/from home, was fascinating to me - we have a lot of those geese and mallards that spend the winter here. I’ve often wondered if they stay all year or have shorter migrations.

My dog doesn't get lost, he's a giant akita, super sweet and friendly, but I mean, he looks like a wolf. I don't want him getting out, but before he was neutered, and I added an l-footer made out of chicken-wire, he figured out ways to get out.

So I would drive out to go find him and by the time I got back, he was waiting outside the door, barking to get in, usually with some stolen toy at his feet.

Now, I've doggy-proofed the yard so he can't get out, but I don't know how he does it but he never gets lost. No matter how far he goes, he's always back before dinner time.

So that's why I'm always thinking that self-driving cars are not going to happen anytime soon. Everyone's underestimated the problem.

Animals don’t get lost the same way Mitch Hedberg never got lost - build a house. Are you lost? Once, now I’m home.

https://archive.is/ltolE

There is a theory that migrating birds can see the magnetic fields using quantum mechanics.

My cats often got lost for weeks, because they crawled into basements and couldn't get out.

Animals do get lost.

As kids, we had a tortoise that wandered off one day only to be found by complete chance in a neighbours garden many months later. It disappeared again not long after never to be seen again.

Either the tortoise really didn't like us or it just never found its way back?

Or it had everything it needed without you...

Or killed by a cat / played with to death by a cat.

Animals do get lost.

On to the next article that takes a fallacy and makes it an axiom.

You are reading the title as "Why animals don't ever get lost". That's one way to read the title. It can also be interpreted as "Why animals don't often get lost", or in other words, "What mechanisms do animals use to avoid getting lost." Which is an interesting question.

Yes, you’re right - thanks for pointing this out.

Their interpretation of the title seems the normal one, yours is very convoluted, like aspiring to some sort of plausible deniability.

If the title was "Why people from country X are thiefs.", that would be very insulting to people from X. If the article turned out to be about why some people from X become thiefs, the title would be very misleading.

Yes, you’re also right - that’s a good way to explain it.

A closer analogy would be "Why people from country X steal" ("get lost" and "steal" are action statements), which, while initially a bit suspicious upon first look, isn't necessarily insulting.

"Why people from country X steal - [Opening sentence] Due to unprecedented levels of corruption and cruelty by their new tyrannical government, a third of the population is starving from man-made famines, leaving many country Xians no choice but to steal food from markets and risk one form of death to avoid another."

Still not great, since it's a negative statement, but not necessarily xenophobic. An even closer analogy would be something positive like "Why people from country X ski so well". I don't imagine there'd be many complaints, probably.

In my opinion, the headline's perfectly fine and clear.

> not necessarily xenophobic

So, to be more specific, the following titles would not be necessarily xenophobic according to your argument:

Why Indians cheat in exams. This is an article about one person of Asian origin that was found to cheat on an exam, and explores its family background and life history that lead to this situation. The author deplores that the young person had to resort to the sad practice of cheating.

Why Jews occupy positions of power. This one is about the excellent homeschooling tradition by some Jewish families that have enabled their kids to be successful in life. It is illustrated by the life stories of three such kids that went on to become powerful CEOs.

Why black people go to live in poor and violent ghettos. This is an article about a black boy that was born in a well-adjusted middle-class family on a good neighborhood but after a sad series of circumstances he was found out living as a drug dealer at the other side of the country. The (black) author deplores that such a promising kid had this horrible fate, and also mentions a couple of other similar cases.

> In my opinion, the headline's perfectly fine and clear.

So, in your opinion, the three headlines that I wrote as examples would be also "perfectly fine and clear"? I don't think so, to me they sound as disgusting racist clickbait, or at least as very misleading titles. The exact same thing for "why animals don't get lost" (and not only for me, many people are complaining that the title is confusing or misleading).

Key on the "not necessarily". It's not phrasing I would ever use, and if I saw it I'd recommend someone change it, but I don't think it necessarily implies anything; it's more like simple, dumb clickbait. I agree it'd probably still be generally considered offensive.

But it's also different because it's negative vs. positive attributes. Animals not getting lost is generally a positive trait. If you had a headline like:

>Why Indians do so well on exams

about them studying a lot or whatever (nothing to do with cheating or anything negative), then it's still probably clickbait-y, but not really offensive or unclear.

I think this is kind of a subtle grammar thing. "Why animals don't get lost" is a somewhat stylized phrasing (common among publications like The New Yorker), which if seen in that stylized context is likely intended to be interpreted as "Why [some/many] animals don't get lost".

Imagine a headline "Why people don't like chocolate". Most people probably like chocolate; some don't. The grammar isn't implying the group "people" does not like chocolate; the plural is referring to an arbitrary, floating bag or set wherein each person happens to not like chocolate. I think "Why animals don't get lost" is using that same kind of grammar.

They could've written "Why animals tend not to get lost", or "Why many animals don't get lost", but it doesn't look or sound as nice. But I'm sure the clickbaitiness was also a factor.

Any tldr for someone not willing to read the whole essay?

Life is short. Get a cat.

I admittedly haven’t read the article, but this seems fishy. Surely some animals aren’t trying to go anywhere specific?

“You gotta be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might never get there.”

- Yogi Berra

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