How do penguins navigate?
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How do penguins navigate?

The answer is that nobody really knows exactly how penguins are able to navigate so effectively. Certainly all the 21,000 African penguins trans-located from Robben and Dassen Islands to Port Elizabeth (some 800 km away) following the oil spill in June 2000, quickly found the correct direction to head home and most arrived back within two weeks (fortunately the oil spill had by then been all cleared up).

Penguin biologists have observed that penguins use the sun, the stars and the Earth's magnetic field to help navigate (if you put a penguin in a remote place on a cloudy day it takes much longer to find the correct direction home than if there is a clear sky, also if you put a magnet on a penguin's head it confuses its sense of direction somewhat).