ArticleScience advances2017
Asymmetry hidden in birds' tracks reveals wind, heading, and orientation ability over the ocean.
Article in Science advances, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trajectory planning for drone landing, incorporating wind-sensing capabilities, operational and safety objectives, and reinforcement learning.Communications engineering · 2025Article
- From biologging to conservation: Tracking individual performance in changing environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Biologging intelligent Platform (BiP): an integrated and standardized platform for sharing, visualizing, and analyzing biologging data.Movement ecology · 2025Review
- Albatrosses employ orientation and routing strategies similar to yacht racers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Wandering albatrosses exert high take-off effort only when both wind and waves are gentle.eLife · 2023Article
- Estimating fine-scale changes in turbulence using the movements of a flapping flier.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Pelagic seabirds reduce risk by flying into the eye of the storm.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Benthic animal-borne sensors and citizen science combine to validate ocean modelling.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Long walk home: Magellanic penguins have strategies that lead them to areas where they can navigate most efficiently.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Compensation for wind drift prevails for a shorebird on a long-distance, transoceanic flight.Movement ecology · 2022Article
- How did extinct giant birds and pterosaurs fly? A comprehensive modeling approach to evaluate soaring performance.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Young frigatebirds learn how to compensate for wind drift.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Numerous flying and swimming animals constantly need to control their heading (that is, their direction of orientation) in a flow to reach their distant destination. However, animal orientation in a flow has yet to be satisfactorily explained because it is difficult to directly measure animal heading and flow. We constructed a new animal movement model based on the asymmetric distribution of the GPS (Global Positioning System) track vector along its mean vector, which might be caused by wind flow. This statistical model enabled us to simultaneously estimate animal heading (navigational decision-making) and ocean wind information over the range traversed by free-ranging birds. We applied this method to the tracking data of homing seabirds. The wind flow estimated by the model was consistent with the spatiotemporally coarse wind information provided by an atmospheric simulation model. The estimated heading information revealed that homing seabirds could head in a direction different from that leading to the colony to offset wind effects and to enable them to eventually move in the direction they intended to take, even though they are over the open sea where visual cues are unavailable. Our results highlight the utility of combining large data sets of animal movements with the "inverse problem approach," enabling unobservable causal factors to be estimated from the observed output data. This approach potentially initiates a new era of analyzing animal decision-making in the field.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.