Washington, Apr 20 (ANI): A new research has suggested that humpback whales may have a unique compass mechanism, which helps them maintain remarkably straight movements for weeks across thousands of kilometres of oceans.
Lead author and environmental scientist Travis Horton, of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and colleagues used satellite tracking technology to follow 16 humpback whales as they migrated from locations off the east coast of Brazil, the Cook Islands and New Caledonia.
They found the whales swam over 6,000 km south towards Antarctic waters, in a series of straight lines, ranging from 100 to 2,000 km long.
"They go in such straight lines that their directions don't go off course by more than a single degree azimuth," said Horton.
"That's hard to do even in a plane or a boat with modern technology."
He said the Sun and magnetic field shift by several degrees more than the course set by the whales, so in themselves couldn't explain these straight lines.
"The position of the Sun and the magnetic field is highly variable, but the whales somehow maintain a constant course."
Horton says it could be, for example, that whales use the Sun's position, relative to the magnetic field, to help them orientate themselves.
The study was recently published in Biology Letters. (ANI)
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