The Animal That Reads the Earth
A reef manta ray tagged off the Maldives in 2015 travelled over 1,100 kilometres in a single migratory leg, crossing open water with no reef, no current marker, and no detectable landmark to guide it. It arrived where it was going. Researchers at the Marine Megafauna Foundation, which has run one of the longest-running manta tracking programmes in the Indian Ocean, have logged hundreds of movements like this. The consistency is the puzzle: these animals do not drift. They navigate.
