The Insect World (Illustrated Edition)

Author: Jean-Henri Fabre (France)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Red Ants
Bringing pigeons to places hundreds of miles away, they will return to their pigeon lofts; swallows, after spending the winter in Africa, can cross the vast ocean to return to their old nests. During this long journey of return, what is guiding them? Is it vision? The author of The Wisdom of Animals, Tuzenel, believes that the guide for traveling pigeons is vision and meteorology; this wise observer may not know as much about animal specimens in glass cages as others, but he is well-versed in the various animals active in nature. He said, "In France, pigeons, based on experience, know that cold comes from the north and heat from the south; dryness from the east and humidity from the west. This meteorological knowledge is enough to help them determine their direction and guide their flight. If a pigeon is placed in a basket and covered, and transported from Brussels to Toulouse, it naturally cannot see the passing landscape during the journey, but no one can stop it from feeling the heat of the atmosphere and thus deducing that it is heading south. By the time it is released in Toulouse, it already knows it must fly north to return to its nest, and it stops only when the average temperature of the surrounding airspace becomes similar to that of its habitat. Even if it doesn’t immediately find its old home, it’s only because it flew slightly to the left or right. But no matter what, within a few hours of searching from east to west, it can correct this small deviation."
Tuzenel’s explanation is very compelling, but unfortunately, it only applies to north-south movements; it doesn’t work for east-west movements along isotherms. Moreover, it cannot be generalized to other animals. When we see a cat navigate unfamiliar streets, moving from one end of the city to the other, we cannot attribute this to vision, nor can we say it’s influenced by the climate. Similarly, what guides my wasps home is certainly not their vision, especially when they are released deep in the forest. Wasps don’t fly high—they stay only a few meters above the ground, making it impossible for them to bird’s-eye-view the terrain and create a map. Besides, why would they need to bird’s-eye-view the terrain? They merely hesitate for a moment, circle around the experimenter a few times, and then immediately fly toward the hive. Despite the trees blocking the branches and the hills rising and falling, they still fly over them along low slopes. Vision helps them avoid obstacles, but it doesn’t tell them which direction to fly. As for meteorology, it plays no role at all: over just a few kilometers, the climate hardly changes. The sense of cold, heat, dryness, and humidity doesn’t provide any guidance for my wasps, because they’ve only been alive for a few weeks and wouldn’t be able to draw any conclusions from it. Even if they had a strong sense of direction, they wouldn’t know which way to fly because the climate of the release site is the same as that of the hive. For all these mysterious phenomena, we can only offer a similarly mysterious explanation: that wasps possess a special sense that humans do not. No one denies Darwin’s undeniable authority, and he also came to the same conclusion as I did.
Doesn’t wanting to know if animals can sense earth currents and whether they are affected near a magnetic needle admit that animals have some sense of magnetism? And aren’t we also capable of similar functions? Of course, I’m referring to physical magnetism, not the magnetism of Mesmer and Cagliostro. We certainly don’t have such functions—if sailors were all compasses themselves, what would be the need for compasses?