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. 2020 Sep 25;23(6):1051–1061. doi: 10.1007/s10071-020-01431-x

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Geomagnetic field (GMF). The GMF offers different cues for navigation: The polarity (red arrows) allows North to be distinguished from South. The magnetic poles (magnetic North mN, magnetic South mS) are shifted relative to the geographic poles (geographic North gN, geographic South gS). The angle between mN and gN is called declination. The intensity (red triangles) is highest at the poles and lowest at the magnetic equator. The inclination is the angle between the GMF lines and gravity (red bars). It changes gradually from the magnetic poles (± 90°) to the magnetic equator (0°)