Why the Salmon Finds the River

How Animals Know Where They Are Going

von Silas Rivers

136 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A sockeye salmon leaves a gravel bed in a creek in British Columbia, spends four years in the open Pacific, and comes back to the same creek. Not the same river. The same few hundred metres of gravel. For most of the twentieth century nobody could say how. The ocean has no landmarks, the fish cannot see the coast, and the organ that reads the Earth's magnetic field has still not been found. What has been found, piece by piece, is the computation: a magnetic value carried from the river mouth for four years, a switch to smell at the coast, and a memory of the stream learned once, in a single season, and never lost. Why the Salmon Finds the River takes twenty-four journeys that sound impossible and finishes each one with the mechanism. Not wonder: the experiment, the number, and, where the answer took a long time, the wrong answers people believed first. Inside you will find: - The fish that aim at a magnetic value rather than a place, and follow it when the field drifts - Why a pigeon with its body clock shifted six hours flies exactly ninety degrees the wrong way - The desert ant fitted with stilts that proved it finds its way home by counting its steps - Eleven thousand starlings flown to the wrong country, and why only the young ones got lost - The godwit that crosses the Pacific in eleven days without landing, eating or gliding - Frigatebirds that sleep in flight, one half of the brain at a time, in naps counted in seconds - The robins that lose their compass in a university town, and the aluminium huts that gave it back - And the blackcaps that invented a new migration route to British bird tables in forty years Twenty-four short chapters, six full plates and eight hand drawn diagrams for the places where a picture says it better than a sentence. The book ends with a quiz and a page of sources. It closes with an honest accounting: what engineers have built from animal navigation, what human navigators worked out first, and the one thing no machine has yet copied. For readers of Ed Yong and David Barrie, and for anyone who has watched a flock heading south and wondered how they know the way. The Impossible Animal, Volume Two.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798174794665
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 16.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published