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Bird with GPS flies into typhoon
- orliesaurus 3y ago> the bird resumed normal transmission and no doubt had some explaining to do when he returned to his flock over the water near the nesting island. as a dad joke appreciator, i love whoever wrote this
- nomel 3y agoIncredible that it never lost its bearings.
- bsder 3y agoTo me, that is WAY more impressive (so is the 4700m altitude!). The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground. That's some amazing navigation skill.
- busyant 3y ago> The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground. And I got lost on one of the simplest hiking trails in a neighboring town last week. I tried to go off-path to circumvent a fallen tree. After about 15 minutes of thinking that I was just steps from reaching my destination, I ended up back at my starting point! I'm ashamed.
- RHSman2 3y agoI believe this is how humanity will die. Internal TomTom degradation!!!
- finite_depth 3y agoI don't know about this specific bird, but many birds have what are essentially biological compasses built into them.
- nomel 3y agoNot sure why this was flagged dead. It's a fact that some birds are sensitive to magnetic fields [1]: > They do this with the help of the magnetically sensitive proteins in their eyes and the magneto-receptive cells in the vestibular nucleus in their brain. [1] https://phys.org/news/2022-02-compass-birds-ways-foreign.html#:~:text=To%20date%2C%20studies%20show%20that,vestibular%20nucleus%20in%20their%20brain https://phys.org/news/2022-02-compass-birds-ways-foreign.htm....
- throwaway290 3y agoAllegedly, dogs too. Unclear how but they align north-south when pooping if they get the chance.
- tasuki 3y agoYes, but that by itself does not help all that much? I give you a compass and an 11 hour ride on a typhoon. The compass won't give you magical ability to return to your starting spot.
- samus 3y agoThe compass allows me to track in which direction I'm roughly blown. Not on the scale of seconds, but hours. As soon as I escape the typhoon, I can start going back.
- kk6mrp 3y agoYou're forgetting that it had GPS!
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI liked this too, but it made me a little sad that the little bird would never be able to tell his bird friends what a crazy adventure he went on.
- photochemsyn 3y agoIt could very well have had a fair amount of company from companion non-GPS-tagged birds (indeed seems a bit more likely?).
- swagempire 3y agoWe never know what's in bird songs...
- tim333 3y agoLink to the paper https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecy.4161 https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002...
- KingLancelot 3y agoThat’s awesome, it’s like Zelda fast travel from wind waker IRL lol.
- jrflowers 3y agoThis could be the future of transportation
- trillic 3y agoCall me when Silicon Valley reinvents sailing
- jrflowers 3y agoAmazon could fly hundreds of their more commonly sold items into a typhoon and distribute them over long distances while using very little energy
- agilob 3y agoMaybe we could also solve some problem of garbage dumps? Build all the garbage dumps on a route of frequent cyclones and the trash just disappears the next Tuesday!
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoI don't want a cyclone every Tuesday. Not even to get rid of the trash.
- jrflowers 3y agoWe could build ramps near common cyclone routes in order to launch the trash into space at escape velocity or at the very least into low earth orbit
- lainga 3y agoI wonder if you (the bird) get hypoxia or altitude sickness and experience the whole thing as a sort of gliding blur
- Scoundreller 3y agoI guess they always have the choice of turning around and increasing the pressure hitting their beak? What’s the temperature like up there though? I guess it’s different during this kind of storm than usual? Internet says temperature drop 2C per 1000’
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago> Internet says temperature drop 2C per 1000’ The Dry Adiabatic Lapse Rate: one of only two things I retained from a Meteorology class decades ago :-)
- seabass-labrax 3y agoAnd the other fantastically unforgettable fact?
- lainga 3y agoThe saturated adiabatic lapse rate! When they meet it's happy land^W^W the cloud base
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoThere are 27 species of clouds. My favorite will always be cirrus spissatus cumulonimbogenitus (google helped me remember how to spell it!).
- matheusmoreira 3y agoNow I won't be able to forget that either. Clouds have species? I thought they were random. Until today.
- quercusa 3y ago>All the while, the bird was zipping along at 90-170 km/h (56-106 mph). Given that these birds generally cruise at 10-60 km/h (6-37 mph), at his top speed I assume the higher speed is "across the ground" but it's possible he flew his usual airspeed the whole time.
- mongol 3y agoYeah. I imagine it is like a ballon that blows away with the wind. To it, there is no wind. Just the ground is moving away below it.
- natoliniak 3y agobut wouldn't the wind exert some pressure on the back of the bird? wouldn't it not generate any lift otherwise and just drop back to the ground? like sails on a sailboat, for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure
- dTal 3y ago>for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure The only way this is possible is if the sails are moving at a different airspeed than the sailors, which is only possible if 1) the sailor is running up and down the deck or 2) there is an windspeed gradient with altitude, which the sails penetrate by virtue of being tall.
- mongol 3y agoThe comparison with the balloon is perhaps not entirely accurate since birds like you say, fly using lift from the wings. So they need to have some relative speed vs the air.
- lxgr 3y agoThe point is that as long as the entire body of air the bird is flying through is moving uniformly and without acceleration, it's perceptually indistinguishable from calm air (except visually, and even that only when flying pretty low). For rotating and turbulent air, which would both not be totally unheard of in a hurricane, this probably doesn't apply though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dcroley 3y agoLike in Dune, once you are in the storm, you have to go with the flow to survive.
- dpflan 3y agoIndeed, like any physical or metaphorical system of forces...
- dylan604 3y agounless you're a salmon
- kunwon1 3y agoHappened to me, in a canoe on a large lake. I had a lot of experience on small lakes, but large lakes also have large waves. Hadn't planned on that. It was either 'go with the waves' or go under
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoTsk. Should have listened to more Gordon Lightfoot :-)
- _yb2s 3y agoOr Stan Rogers “Don’t take the Lakes for granted. They go from calm to a hundred knots so fast they seem enchanted.”
- lucb1e 3y agoBased on the map, showing data both before and after the circular typhoon-caught pattern, I take it the bird survived? That's... I hope they didn't get hurt at all, but that sounds rather epic from the bird's perspective in retrospect!
- esaym 3y ago> Regardless, looking at this wild ride highlights the increasing risks that seabird populations could face as climate change drives more extreme weather events. Is this hurricane really an outcome of "climate change"?
- o11c 3y agoThe existence of hurricanes isn't, but the frequency and severity very much are.
- PlunderBunny 3y agoMaybe not, but there might simply be more hurricanes due to climate change?
- myko 3y agoThe increase in hurricanes is, yes. To claim specific hurricane is a direct result of climate change is probably not meaningful - they're all related to climate, and climate change is causing more to occur.
- chrisweekly 3y agoPrecisely. When you keep rolling double sixes, check to see if the dice are normal. Climate change paints a "6" on more than one face of each die. Hence the so-called (now misnomer) "century storm" happening multiple times in one decade.
- m3kw9 3y agoThat’s a nice 1000km free ride
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoFast travel unlocked
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tibbydudeza 3y agohttps://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/40553/20221018/flying-streaked-shearwaters-survive-typhoons-riding-study-suggests.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/40553/20221018/flying-... Seems the ones who live on the Japanese islands do this as standard practice. Like their bigger cousins they use dynamic soaring. A technique for harvesting energy from the wind by up and down oscillations to cover distance rather expending muscle energy flapping their wings. Afaik they can also lock their wings into glide mode with tendons without causing muscle fatigue to maintain flight for days on end. Also using unihemispheric slow wave sleep aids in that as well.
- helaoban 3y agoHow do we get a livecam on one of these things.
- constantly 3y agoSomewhat related: https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/altius-drone-flies-hurricane-ian/ https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/altius-drone-flies-hurricane-ian/
- culi 3y agoI don't think white feathers and gray rainclouds at 240p would make for a particularly interesting watch
- vocram 3y agoCurious how it managed to find its way back home.
- eszed 3y agoVery, very small sample size. This might be more common behavior than we realize.
- kelsey9876543 3y agocan somebody PLEASE simulate this in MS flight simulator???
- Rastonbury 3y agoReminds me of the people who have accidentally parachuted or para-glided through a cumulonimbus clouds, the stories are insane. Getting spun until they vomit, getting hit by tennis ball sized hail, frostbite, lightning and thunders meters away
- canbus 3y agoWhen I read the title I thought a bird had flown into a Eurofighter Typhoon. Probably wouldn't have made it home, even with the GPS...
- Aaargh20318 3y agoNever mind this bird's journey. The most surprising thing about this is that they apparently have GPS trackers that are small and light enough to attach to a bird and have long enough battery life to be able to track them over longer periods of time. I assume they don't catch the bird on a daily basis to replace the batteries.
- tim333 3y agoYeah. Some info >GPS loggers (13–14 g, 2–3% of body mass; PinPoint VHF-GPS, LOTEK) were attached to the back feathers using waterproof tape (Tesa). The loggers were set to record the geographic position every 15 min and send data via radio communication to the receiver placed within the breeding colony when birds returned from the sea. The tracking duration of the birds ranged from 8.9 to 34.2 days (mean ± S.D.: 24.8 ± 6.8 days).
- Mystery-Machine 3y ago> scientists were lucky enough to have a record of this nuts nature-defying act I don't believe "this nuts" was added by chance.
- ceautery 3y agoI'm glad the article had a plot of the bird's path. It looks almost like a hypotrochoid that you could draw with a Spirograph set.