The Adaptive Significance of Animal Navigation

• Navigational abilities promote reproductive success
• Navigational abilities facilitate food acquisition
• Migrating animals need navigation

Navigational Strategies

• Trail following is the most rudimentary form of animal navigation
• Piloting animals follow a discontinuous series of learned cues
• Path integration is a form of dead reckoning
• Animals can derive compass information from environmental cues
• Some animals appear to possess a map sense
• BOX 18.1 Magnetoreceptors and Magnetoreception Kenneth J. Lohmann
• Sea turtles exemplify the degree of our understanding of navigation

Innate and Learned Components of Navigation

• Some forms of navigation have strong innate aspects
• The hippocampus is a critical brain area for vertebrate spatial learning and memory
• BOX 18.2 Migratory Navigation in Monarch Butterflies: Sensory and Genomic Information