Fig. 1. Diagram illustrating potential problems in attempting to infer mechanisms of navigation from the tracks of animals. (A) Overhead view of the track of a hypothetical sea turtle moving hundreds of kilometers through the ocean and monitored with satellite telemetry; events that occurred along the way are indicated. (B) A plausible but erroneous interpretation of the turtle's path. In this hypothetical example, researchers unaware of what happened in the ocean superimposed the track on several topographical and geophysical maps until correlations were found between changes in the turtle's behavior and specific features of the environment. These environmental cues were then assumed to have elicited the behavioral changes, leading to incorrect inferences about navigational mechanisms.