Animal Senses #12: Magnetism
Magnetoreception refers to the ability to navigate using the earth’s magnetic field for context. A very interesting thought experiment on this topic was to change the magnetic field around such species and see if they changed direction. In practice, that’s easy to do with small animals, but how could one try that with something as big as a whale? Sounds impossible, except nature itself creates such situations, says Ed Yong in Immense World : “The sun periodically throws cosmic tantrums and produces solar storms – streams of radiation and charged particles that affect the Earth’s magnetic field.” Scientists collated 33 years of data on healthy whales that inexplicably stranded themselves onto beaches. They then compared that with the data on solar activity. And bingo! On days with the most intense solar storms, gray whales were four times more likely to beach themselves. The magnetic field has two components. The first one is inclination , the angle at which the geomagnet...