I did not consent!

As long as they kept to themselves and didn’t crawl on my face en masse, or at least wake me up while doing it, that’s okay with me.

Birds aren’t arthropods. They’re theropods.

There is evidence that the human brain can detect magnetic fields on an unconscious level, although it’s far from settled science.

https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-other-animals-may-sense-earth-s-magnetic-field

I think it is entirely possible that we have vestigial magnetosensitivity from hundreds of millions of years ago. If that is so, however, it gives us the potential to redevelop it in the future.

There’s also a way to fake it- people have made haptic “compasses,” wearable devices like belts which vibrate north at all times. I remember reading many years ago about the first scientists to develop the technology and the first person (one of the scientists) to try it out, and he said that he was able to know where north was for a long time afterward.

I should say I was only talking about the first part when I meant faking it. We really don’t know if wearing the device made him temporarily (I think it was temporary) magnetosensitive or if he just got so used to where north was in his daily routines that it was just memory.

Hooray. This brought up one of the less pleasant memories from my childhood involving the natural world.

My room was in the basement of the house. It was only a half-finished basement and my room took up most of the finished half. But because it was only half finished, spiders were not a stranger to my room.

One day, I woke up and my face was weirdly itchy. I turned on the light and a billion little transparent baby spiders were hanging all over the room by little threads! I freaked the fuck out and ran upstairs and slept on the couch for two days. Thankfully, they were gone when I went back down.

I doubt they have the brain capacity to think of much beyond “food/mate this direction.”