Slashdot Mirror
Pigeons May 'Hear' Magnetic Fields
ananyo writes "Individual neurons in birds' brains can relay crucial information about Earth's magnetic field, possibly providing the animals with an 'internal GPS.' Pigeons' remarkable navigational feats have long been pegged to the birds' ability to sense magnetic fields, but pinning down how they do so has frustrated scientists for years. Work published in Science (abstract) shows that individual cells seem to encode information on a magnetic field's direction, intensity and polarity. The work also suggests that these signals come from a part of the inner ear called the lagena, further complicating matters for researchers in the field. The Science paper comes just days after a report in Nature (abstract) revealed that cells in pigeons' upper beaks, previously thought to be magnetoreceptors, are actually immune cells called macrophages."
People remark how the turtles can find a small location in the middle of the ocean years after they were born. As long as the Earth's magnetic poles don't radically shift, the turtles could mark a location in their mind when they're born. Then when they need to mate, the signals to their brain tell them where to go on that primal mark.
This is just a random wandering thought. If someone is more informed, feel free to enlighten me.
God spoke to me
Just because the signals originate in the inner ear, they aren't necessarily audio signals. The semicircular canals in my inner ear don't enable me to 'hear' the local gravity either.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
I wonder if this could lead to a magnetic alternative to the netting that's used to keep pigeon's off of balconies?
Some sort of a device that produces a magnetic field that pigeons find unpleasant...
It is common knowledge. How it works is not.
Since pigeons seem to have been around for at least 23 million years, during which perhaps 40-50 pole reversals have occurred (according to the wikipedia article), they probably have some evolutionary method of dealing with it...