Google Earth and animal magnetism

[dianeduane]

In today’s “moos:“

German scientists using satellite images posted online by the Google Earth software program have observed something that has escaped the notice of farmers, herders and hunters for thousands of years: Cattle grazing or at rest tend to orient their bodies in a north-south direction just like a compass needle.

Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen and their colleagues found that two out of every three animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north.

The resolution of the images was not sufficient to tell which ends of the cows were pointing north, however. Asked if he had ever observed such behavior in cows, dairy farmer Rob Fletcher of Tulare said, “Absolutely not.” But, he added, “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like that.”

Tags: cows, magnetic, field, Earth, cattle, grazing, Duisberg, Essen, north, south

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Great, one more way for kids to wind up getting themselves more lost once lost already! :)

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

It will be interesting to hear if biologists will find magnetic sensing grains in the ears of cattle, as has been found with birds (to the best of my memory).

I suppose it is possible that prevailing winds could also influence which direction they faced?

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. gee I wonder if this could be because the cows are turning their sides into the sun thus warming their stomaches and promoting digestion/fermentation without wasting too much energy.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, given that the resolution wasn't good enough to tell what end was which, my guess is that their criteria for determining the direction the cow is aligned isn't very precise. Say it's 30 degrees either side of North-South, that's 120 degrees out of 360 degrees, so 33% of the possible directions. So they're seeing about twice as many cows as they should aligned NS - assuming that it's pure chance. But when you take into account things like maximizing sunlight as someone else pointed out, facing into the wind to minimise cooling, the direction from which the cows expect to see the farmer deliver the next tractor-load of oil cake, etc. it probably isn't that rand om.

[bar-gamer.livejournal.com]

With Google Earth, frequently you get a top-down view of something. Just because you can't which end has the horns doesn't mean you can't see the orientation of the body, especially since you have that compass over there in the corner.

[occams_pyramid]

According to The Register the effect shows up even with varying sun and wind angles.

But actually it's obvious. The cows are worried about being got rid of due to their methane increasing global warming. So they're trying to re-invent themselves as fridge magnets.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that maybe they had a preference based on light direction and optimizing visibility, because they're prey animals and they evolved to be able to see all around themselves while they eat.

I wonder if they would find that human sunbathers have a preference for orienting themselves in a certain direction with respect to the sun.

Of course, one way to check, as long as there isn't too much uncertainty in the measurements, is to see whether they line up more with the local magnetic anomaly and point themselves along lines of magnetic north and south, or whether there's variation with latitude and they're aligning themselves with celestial or ecliptic north and south.

Two out of three cows doesn't seem like a very concrete finding, though.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

I suspect that any directional preference human sunbathers might have is probably not significant enough to manifest itself in the face of other factors. Mainly I'm thinking here of the tendency to align relative to the local environment first - parallel or perpendicular to the beach, edge of the pool, shape of the yard or porch, etc.

Alas, there's probably not a large enough population of people who sunbathe in the middle of large open areas to get good statistics :)

[rainbowk.livejournal.com]

Ah ha! I had suspected this, as can be seen from this post from my travel journal in 2004:

Today is "Cows Facing North Day" in Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh, India (http://rainbowsjourney.livejournal.com/11808.html)

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

have observed something that has escaped the notice of farmers, herders and hunters for thousands of years:

That's kind of a funny statement - I heard from my cattle-ranching grandpa when I was a kid that cows would orient themselves to all face a certain direction - he always said it was based on the direction the wind was coming from. Which, in the plains of North Dakota, was pretty much always from the same direction ...