page_title: Animal navigation
section_title: Orientation by the sun
hierarchical_section_title: Animal navigation / Mechanisms / Orientation by the sun
caption_attribution_description: Talitrus saltator English: Sand hopper at the beach of the Baltic Sea at Bornholm island Polski: Zmieraczek plażowy
context_page_description: Animal navigation is the ability of many animals to find their way accurately without maps or instruments. Birds such as the Arctic tern, insects such as the monarch butterfly and fish such as the salmon regularly migrate thousands of miles to and from their breeding grounds, and many other species navigate effectively over shorter distances.
  Dead reckoning, navigating from a known position using only information about one's own speed and direction, was suggested by Charles Darwin in 1873 as a possible mechanism. In the 20th century, Karl von Frisch showed that honey bees can navigate by the sun, by the polarization pattern of the blue sky, and by the earth's magnetic field; of these, they rely on the sun when possible. William Tinsley Keeton showed that homing pigeons could similarly make use of a range of navigational cues, including the sun, earth's magnetic field, olfaction and vision. Ronald Lockley demonstrated that a small seabird, the Manx shearwater, could orient itself and fly home at full speed, when released far from home, provided either the sun or the stars were visible.
context_section_description: Some animals can navigate using celestial cues such as the position of the sun. Since the sun moves in the sky, navigation by this means also requires an internal clock. Many animals depend on such a clock to maintain their circadian rhythm. Animals that use sun compass orientation are fish, birds, sea-turtles, butterflies, bees, sandhoppers, reptiles, and ants.
  When sandhoppers (such as Talitrus saltator) are taken up a beach, they easily find their way back down to the sea. It has been shown that this is not simply by moving downhill or towards the sight or sound of the sea. A group of sandhoppers were acclimatised to a day/night cycle under artificial lighting, whose timing was gradually changed until it was 12 hours out of phase with the natural cycle. Then, the sandhoppers were placed on the beach in natural sunlight. They moved away from the sea, up the beach. The experiment implied that the sandhoppers use the sun and their internal clock to determine their heading, and that they had learnt the actual direction down to the sea on their particular beach.
  Experiments with Manx shearwaters showed that when released "under a clear sky" far from their nests, the seabirds first oriented themselves and then flew off in the correct direction. But if the sky was overcast at the time of release, the shearwaters flew around in circles.
  Monarch butterflies use the sun as a compass to guide their southwesterly autumn migration from Canada to Mexico.
caption: The sandhopper, Talitrus saltator, uses the sun and its internal clock to determine direction.
exif: {}