Compass Confirms Dogs Are Good
In a new study, dogs consistently added "magnetic" compass data to their tracking behaviors.
Dogs are prized for their navigational skills.
That's especially true in contexts that disorient or endanger humans.
Science shows dogs could be using the Earth’s magnetic field when they navigate, which only proves they're even better than we thought.
In a new study, international ethologists—those who study animal behavior that speaks to natural function and evolution—put cameras and GPS trackers on 27 “free-roaming scent hounds” to observe how the dogs found their way back to a specific destination during more than 600 trial walks over several years.
Many animals use the magnetic field to navigate, especially those that migrate long distances each year or naturally travel around huge areas as part of their hunting or mating cycles. “I don’t think all species perhaps use the magnetic field, but I think that the list is probably much greater than we anticipated,” animal molecular neuroethologist Andres Vidal-Gadea said in a 2018 interview.
But a broad generalization isn’t the same as verifying on an individual level. That’s where the scent-hound study comes in. The researchers explain:
“[D]esigning systematic studies to characterize the navigational strategies and underlying sensory mechanisms mediating homing behaviour in non-migratory species, particularly in free-ranging mammals, [has] proven difficult, and our understanding of large-scale navigation and homing remains incomplete.”
After fitting the tracking dogs with the gear and watching how they behaved over the course of over the walks, the scientists explored how owner position at the beginning, for example, might affect a dog’s natural direction as they decide where to start running. They also controlled for factors like breed and sex as well as sun position and wind.
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Scent tracking is fairly well understood, even if it still seems like a superpower to feeble-nosed humans. In dogs, this behavior is called tracking—like in a procedural TV show when a dog is given a scrap of clothing to smell and then takes off into the woods. Dogs are excellent at tracking, but these researchers point out this behavior can be very tedious and slow. Are dogs also using magnetic cues as they work through a long route?
What the researchers found surprised them.
“In this study, we analyzed only scouting events and found a conspicuous phenomenon. In most cases, dogs start their return with a short (about 20 m long) run, called here compass run, mostly performed along the north-south axis irrespective of the actual homeward direction,” they say. “It is unlikely that the direct involvement of visual, olfactory or celestial cues can explain the highly stereotyped and consistent ~north south alignment of the compass run.”
The researchers explain how dogs have been bred for their navigational prowess and used during wartime for their ability to find their way home. But the pups in this study started with a notable, north-south jaunt regardless of where they started or where they went afterward.
This, the researchers say, “is consistent with a wealth of studies providing support for spontaneous magnetic alignment along the north-south magnetic axis in a range of vertebrates in the field.”
“Despite anecdotal reports of the astonishing homing abilities in dogs, their homing strategies are not fully understood,” the researchers say in their paper. “While tracking may be safe, it is lengthy. Scouting enables taking shortcuts and might be faster but requires navigation capability and, because of possible errors, is risky.”
The compass run indicates that dogs are feeling the pull of the magnetic field, even if they only use it to set the stage before they start to track a scent.
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