In the featureless desert, Cataglyphis ants head straight home after zigzagging for hundreds of meters. They combine a sun compass with a built-in pedometer. To prove it, researchers glued stilts onto some ants' legs and shortened the legs of others: the stilt-walkers overshot the nest, while the others stopped short.
In 2022, a young tagged bar-tailed godwit flew from Alaska to Tasmania in about 11 days of nonstop flight, covering 13,560 km without eating, drinking or landing. Before departure, these birds pile on huge fat reserves and shrink their digestive organs, which are useless during the journey.
To escape rivals, a dung beetle rolls its ball of dung in a straight line. At night, it holds its course using the glowing band of the Milky Way. In a planetarium, researchers showed that beetles rolled straight under a starry sky but wandered aimlessly when the galaxy was switched off. It was the first animal known to navigate this way.