A cell in the eye may be worth two in the beak, at least when it comes to a migratory bird’s magnetic compass. In European robins, a visual center in the brain and light-sensing cells in the eye — not magnetic sensing cells in the beak — allow the songbirds to sense which direction is north and migrate correctly, a new study finds. The study, appearing Oct. 29 in Nature, may improve conservation efforts for migratory birds.
“This is really fascinating science,” says biophysicist Klaus Schultenof the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was one of the first to suggest that migrating birds can sense magnetic fields.
Researchers have known that built-in biological compasses tell migrating birds which way to fly, but the details of how birds detect magnetic fields has been unclear.
“This is basically the sixth sense of biology, but no one knows how it works,” says study co-author Henrik Mouritsenof the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “The magnetic sense is by far the least-understood sense in the natural world.”
There was an article in the New Scientist last year stating that minuscule iron filaments had been found in the eyeballs of certain birds and that under specific lighting conditions (Dawn/Dusk) these filaments would allow the birds to set their compass for the day.
Errr, do European Robins migrate? I thought they didn’t.
Um, they still use the magnetic field, it’s just that the magnetic sensing is done by a photolytically produced radical rather than a ferrous deposit.
I learned about this in college. Very interesting. x
@Alex Whiteside – pardon..? It’s OK I think I get it, haha!
Too confusing…read about the magnetic sensors in Robins and now light sensors in the eye…take a break. Similar posts should be separated by atleast 7 days.
It’s kinda amazing that they still seem to “sense” the magnetic field up there in the air, considered the size of those systems in a bird.
My birds, very different species and not migration birds, respond slow to light. They need a lot of time to adjust from dark to light, it seems to make them desoriented. So, to migrate back to where they came from … from the floor to their sleeping place up there (when something disturbs them in the middle of the night).
The use of this research is beyond doubt .. there is no use. I myself would not want to perform research on animals only for a better understanding of them. It’s not worthy.