Kids always have and always will get embarrassed or annoyed when their mothers make a big deal about them leaving or express suffocating levels of worry about their children’s safety. But a techie/slightly geeky father’s concern for his child’s welfare tends to translate a bit differently than that which is expressed by mothers. When it was time for me to hit the road from the middle of upstate NY out here to Sunny San Diego, my dad gave me a GPS to take along since I was making the trek on my own…here’s your GPS, now go west young man!

While driving to my destination determined by as far West as the waters of the Pacific Ocean would allow me to go, I would look over at my GPS and think with great relief that the elimination of one of the four directions would make navigation as simple as looking over to my right…no, left and using the big blue as my go-to orientation point, my salty wet North Star. [Is this guy going to write something about sharks or what?] I envisioned shedding shoes and socks while running to the water’s edge and tossing my GPS it into the ocean and drowning that witch of a navigation narrator who told me that I’d gone off the map every time I drove on a circular highway exit or entrance ramp. Wait…this is an earth blog…and that would be polluting…of course, I would craft a symbolic GPS made of seaweed and beach wood scraps and throw that in. Alas, even with a reference point as significant as the Pacific Ocean, I’m still heavily reliant on my GPS.

Why all the buildup? Because sharks don’t have the luxury of using the ocean as a giant navigation reference point like humans do, and electronic GPS devices definitely do not mix well with water. Do they swim around the ocean aimlessly, their direction influenced by the tastiest schools of fish, guided along a specific path by warmer waters? While some sharks do indeed express random navigation, “random walks,” while searching for food or canvassing the perimeter of their home territory, solid research proves that certain types of sharks actually demonstrate the ability to execute “directed walks.”

Shark Migration

While out on these directed walks, sharks have been observed to routinely cover precise distances between specific points in open ocean waters; even at night. They accomplish this through the generation of mind maps, charting out specific locations that consistently provide them with resources vital to their survival. In fact, some sharks are capable of navigating to predetermined points as far as 50km away!

So, one could imagine how much more embarrassing it’d be for a shark to ever have to ask for directions.