Comparative Biosonar & Navigation — A Method, Its Results, Its Corrections, and an Invitation

An independent, self-deposited research record on comparative biosonar and navigation across animals that sense, signal, and find their way by different physical means. It comprises an overview plus four companion documents: a falsifiable comparative method; a tiered results document separating peer-reviewed findings from the project's own small-n analyses and a synthesis hypothesis; a register of ideas the project tested and retired; and a set of pre-registered open questions with an invitation to data stewards. A central contribution is a federated-analysis protocol that lets data stewards answer ecological questions about sensitive species without exposing raw positions, times, or identities: the steward sets the output resolution and reviews each result for re-identification risk before release. Findings are status-tagged (grounded / synthesis-hypothesis / retired / blocked) to mark exactly what each claim rests on. Source datasets are cited by DOI and not re-hosted. Companion to the author's substrate-independence trilogy. Keywords biosonar, echolocation, bioacoustics, sperm whale, comparative method, animal navigation, dead reckoning, marine mammal conservation, federated analysis, data protection, reproducibility, pre-registration