Magnetic cells key to animal migration

[n2doc]

By Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times
July 13, 2012, 7:18 p.m.
Animal migration is one of the great wonders of the natural world. Monarch butterflies, Arctic terns and humpback whales, among other species, travel thousands of miles to escape harsh seasonal weather and find more hospitable climes, like New Yorkers who high-tail it for Florida when the first snowflake drops.

But, unlike humans, animal species don't have airlines and highways to guide them. How do they make their amazing journeys?

With the help of magnets, according to new research.

An international team of scientists identified cellular machinery in migratory trout that allows them to detect and respond to the Earth's magnetic field. The ability explains how animals are able to maintain their long-distance pilgrimages even after human activity changes the visual layout of the migratory path.


more

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-magnetic-sensing-cells-20120714,0,3912716.story

[Warpy]

1. Some people have it, too

You know, the annoying types like me who can be in the middle of an urban area and get where they want to go because they always know where it is, it's thataway, we'll find our way through these one way the wrong way streets eventually.

I made it from NM to my dad's house in Florida without a map. I'd only driven there once before, almost 30 years previously, and from Boston.

If I could teach people this stuff, I'd make a fortune and put the makers of in car GPS devices out of business.

[chknltl]

2. I have long wondered about that.

I know salmon about to spawn use a sense of "smell" to navigate with when they near the river of their birth. What I was perplexed by was how they navigated there from the open ocean.

This magnetic cells revelation leads me to wonder if the entire earth is covered in an unseeable magnetic map, one with micro-variations that these cells can detect. Perhaps these micro variations change with the earth's rotation around the sun, which might be what these migrating creatures are following.

By now the earth has been mapped every way to Sunday by satellites, likely down to those magnetic microvariences if they do indeed exist.. Perhaps a study could be made where migration routes are matched up with the earth's magnetic field fluctuations and microvariations.