On the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources web page about the marine turtle conservation program it says, "When a hatchling sea turtle is attracted away from the ocean towards a direct or indirect source of light, biologists describe this as a disorientation event."
Does something like the disorientation event describing the sea turtle behavior also occur in other species?
As sort of a "teach to fish" answer, let's approach how to answer a question like this:
Google Scholar is a pretty good index of scientific literature: good enough for this purpose. If you search:
"disorientation event" -turtle
you will return all results that use the specific phrase "disorientation event" except those that mention turtles.
You can also do the search:
"disorientation event" turtle
to find the turtle papers. As of today, "disorientation event" returns 57 results; 14 also include the word "turtle", 43 do not.
Among the 43, it looks like the majority of papers are discussing human disorientation, particularly in the context of human pilots but also in the context of cognitively impaired individuals or simply lost pedestrians. There is one paper that uses the term referring to rats in a maze-like task.
Overall, these results lead me to conclude that "disorientation event" is not a common general term used by biologists to refer to non-turtle species losing their way, although I would also say that I would expect a biologist to understand the meaning of the term given sufficient context.
I'm only familiar with the bird research and it is not a commonly used term in ornithology. Birds use multiple methods for navigation which include the sun, stars and the earth's magnetic field. When biologists talk about birds becoming disoriented (usually by magnetic fields or they could appear to be disoriented after a fallout event, due to a hurricane etc) they don't refer to it as a disorientation event, as far as I know, there isn't a term to describe these events in ornithology.
I feel like I should clarify, since I used a term and then said there isn't a term... "Fallout" or migration fallout is when severe weather prevents birds from reaching it's destination (e.g. breeding grounds or wintering grounds) and instead taking refuge in an unusual place (what we could consider unusual, as it's not their normal path of migration, not their "normal" stopover site). It's not actually referring to birds becoming disoriented, which is why I would say this is not a term to describe a disorientation event.
