The Dissociative Vector: A Mechanistic Hypothesis for Fatal Inland Walking in Adélie Penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) at Ross Island

This paper proposes the Dissociative Vector Model: a mechanistic hypothesis explaining fatal inland walking in Adélie penguins. The model suggests this behaviour results from activation of the innate "nonsense orientation" survival heuristic under conditions that corrupt navigational output—specifically circadian desynchronization from continuous polar daylight and/or geomagnetic anomalies of the McMurdo Volcanic Province.

The paper synthesizes 115 years of documented observations (1911–2007), connects Emlen and Penney's 1960s navigation experiments to field observations for the first time, identifies a systematic "tracking gap" in modern research, and provides energetics analysis demonstrating the observed trajectory was physiologically viable.

Supplementary materials include KML geospatial files for Google Earth and a Python energetics calculator.