Elephant Seal’s Map Sense Tells Them When to Head ‘Home’
Published:03 Mar.2022 Source:Cell Press
Each year, pregnant female elephant seals take an approximately 240-day trek over 10,000 kilometers across the Eastern North Pacific Ocean before returning to their breeding beaches to give birth within five days of their arrival. Now, a study appearing February 28 in the journal biology Current Biology finds that this impressive navigation ability depends on an internal map sense, which functions much like a built-in GPS.
"We found that migrating elephant seals know how far they are from their breeding beach thousands of kilometers away," said Roxanne Beltran of the University of California Santa Cruz. "They also know approximately how long it will take them to get back."