Michael JensenMy other compass is a cow
August 29th 2008 12:20
Meet Hamish, the hairy highland cow
They looked at thousands of images of cattle in fields on Google Earth and found that bovines seemed to be on a north-south axis regardless of wind, rain or sun. I always thought they angled according to the wind, but apparently this is an evolutionary hangover from the times they needed to make their long distance migrations. After all, homing pigeons, whales and turtles find their way around using the earth's magnetic field, so why can't cows?
Although this sounds really silly and I can't help wondering who funded them and why, it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), which is a really prestigious journal. Hell, I would have loved to get a paper published in PNAS... So there must be *something* to it.
As an aside, did you know that the earth's magnetic field is weakening and may one day change its polarity (ie south becomes north and north becomes south? The feeling among scientists is that the various animals would be able to cope with both scenarios but I do wonder if more whales might beach themselves, since they can be fairly easily misguided now...
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