Travis Horton

Humpback whale migrations through space and time

About the Speaker

Travis Horton is an Earth System Scientist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Travis’s interest in whales developed from his Ph.D. research at Stanford University under the supervision of Professor Page Chamberlain, a pioneer in use of biochemical fingerprints as tracers of animal movements. Since moving to New Zealand in 2007, Travis has collaborated with Nan Hauser, Director of the Center for Cetacean Research and Conservation, and researchers at N.O.A.A.’s Marine Mammal Laboratory, on projects aimed at answering the question: How do whales navigate? These collaborations have led to unique insights into how individual whales use environmental cues to swim across vast expanses of open-ocean without getting lost. Travis has championed establishment of the new Chord and Clock paradigm for animal navigation, an empirical data based framework that includes both spatial and temporal cues for orientation. This entirely natural system of navigation allows whales and other animals to find and follow identical migration routes at distinctly different Julian calendar dates and times during the most awe-inspiring of animal movements. Travis looks forward to applying this mechanistic understanding of animal navigation to the development of predictive models of animal movement for conservation purposes and satellite-free global positioning systems in the second-half of his career.