PETER TYACK
Professor of Marine Mammal Biology Scottish Oceans Institute, School of Biology University of St Andrews Fife, Scotland, U.K.PHOTO BY TOM KLEINDINST/© WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTIONIn 1974, during the spring semester of his junior year at Harvard University, Peter Tyack noticed a summer job posting tacked up on the bulletin board of the undergraduate biology office. “It said, ‘Do you want to clean pigeon cages, train homing pigeons, and join a project studying how pigeons navigate?’” says the marine mammal biologist. Tyack’s answer was an emphatic yes. “I leapt at this first opportunity to do fieldwork.” In high school, Tyack had worked at a start-up medical devices company in Palo Alto. The office job was a stark contrast to time spent hiking and mountain climbing, and he was itching to spend time in the field
Under the supervision of animal behaviorist Charles Walcott, Tyack spent that summer in Lincoln, Massachusetts, securing tiny magnetic coils to the heads of homing pigeons. Depending on the orientation of the battery’s polarity, the pigeons would either fly home or 180 degrees from home under overcast skies when the sun was not visible, Walcott and his students found. “It was an early and really clean experiment on the impact of magnetic field on navigation,” says Tyack.
“Right whales have moved from being basses to being tenors to avoid all of the low-frequency noise from shipping.”
That summer job was fortuitous because it led Tyack to study marine mammal communication. Next door to the house where Walcott and his students worked, Roger Payne—who in 1967, along ...
