SUPERNAVIGATORS

Sunday Times Best Nature Book of the Year. We meet animals that use a sense of smell, others that navigate based on polarised light, others on magnetism. We meet the blind Mexican cavefish that uses the pressure waves from its own motion to detect different objects, the spiny lobsters that form long straight conga lines of up to 200 metres as they trudge nose to tail into the deep, dragonflies that hitch a lift on monsoon winds, and ants that measure how far they've travelled by counting their steps. Animals plainly know where they're going, but how they know has remained a stubborn mystery - until now. Supernavigators is a globe-trotting voyage of discovery alongside astounding animals of every stripe: dung beetles that steer by the Milky Way, box jellyfish that can see above the water (with a few of their 24 eyes), sea turtles that sense Earth's magnetic field, and many more. The number of animals travelling long distance from insects to sea turtles and from eels to whales is just astonishing, as all the many ways in which they find their way. David Barrie consults animal behaviourists and Nobel Prize-winning scientists to catch us up on the cutting edge of animal intelligence, revealing these wonders in a whole new light. 305 page paperback.