Animal Behaviour and Plant Responses
Orientation Responses Lesson #3
Wed 25th Feb – Tues 4th Mar
By the end of this week (Tues 4th Mar), you should have completed (since the beginning of the course) the entire Orientation Responses section of your Biozone book (p166-185).
Read this whole task sheet before you embark on your work.
Tasks for this week:
- Make sure you have completed last week’s work and clicked through the weblinks on last week’s task sheet.
- The new concepts for this week are
a. Sun compass navigation p182
b. Homing p183-185
- Fill out the glossary sheets for Orientation Responses
- Visit our blog site http://vcbiolevel3.blogtown.co.nz/ , watch the video and click through the related links
- Complete the revision exercises
Sun compass navigation
Honey bees navigate using the sun as a compass. The illustration on p182 attempts to show you the “Waggle Dance” which bees do in order to communicate to each other the location of a food source. On our blog site http://vcbiolevel3.blogtown.co.nz/ I have posted a youtube video of the bees doing this dance. Check it out as it makes it a lot easier to understand than the static diagram! This dance is often referred to in an exam question.
Homing
Homing is the ability of an organism to return to its ‘home’ despite having been removed or leaving and covering a fair distance. The homing pigeon is obviously a good example of this but many insects also demonstrate homing. The sun or stars may be used to navigate, or familiar landmarks. Sometimes a trail of chemical scent (pheromone) may be deposited by the organism as it travels away from home so that it can follow it back home when it returns – a bit like Hansel and Gretel with the breadcrumbs!
Revision Exercises
Complete the revision exercises that I will compile and email to you by the end of Friday. These will help you practise using the terminology and understand the concepts covered in the orientation responses unit.