After years roaming the oceans, often thousands of kilometers away, many female sea turtles come back to nest on the stretch of coast where they hatched. Their GPS is Earth's magnetic field: each part of the coastline has its own magnetic signature, which hatchlings appear to memorize at birth and seek out again decades later.
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.