Animals like pigeons, lobsters, moles, even fruit flies can use the magnetic field for orientating themselves in the globe. This has been known since a couple of decades, but why do we know so little about it even if there’s loads of experiments and research going on with this topic?
I was reading an article on the new scientist about this and I found it really interesting. Basically, even there are a lot of animals with some kind of ability for feeling the magnetic field, none of them show a real organ or region in their body that is designed for this. As the article says “There is no nose or ear for feeling the magnetic field that we can appreciate”, and also, if this different “organ” even exist, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the same place for all animals which sense the magnetic field.
Lately one of the substances that has been studied is Cryptochrome, a type of protein found in the eyes of some animals. It produces radicals (A type of chemical compound) depending on the magnetic field, and it’s used by fruit flies for sensing the magnetic field, for example. For proving that this substance had something to do with magnetic orientation, a team of scientists from the University of Oxford genetically modified a group of fruit flies cutting down the gene which produced this substance. This engineered flies that didn’t present Cryptochrome, weren’t able to orientate using the magnetic field. Unfortunately, we cannot say that all animals which sense the magnetic changes base that perception on this substance, because humans also contain Cryptochrome and we don’t sense the magnetic field.
Animals with the ability to feel the magnetic field are still a mystery for us, so there’s still a lot of research to be done in this topic, but if we get to find what is the real root of all this, It could have great benefits for us.
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