Several years ago an intriguing story of successful navigation in complex situation, by pigeons, the birds most often compared to rats, caught my eye.

Our backyard once had a coop full of pigeons, so I’m not a total stranger to their navigation abilities (nor am I a pigeon expert). My favorites were the tumbling pigeons.

But it didn’t take much time researching that article from 2012, to learn that one of the more hotly debated how-do-they-do-it topics is animal navigation, in particular, the ability of pigeons to navigate back to home/point A when released at point B.

So when it appeared online today, in Nature Materials, the story “A Magnetic Protein Biocompass” caught my eye.

Continue reading “How Fruit Flies (and maybe Pigeons?) Navigate; A New Report”