A Magnetic Sixth Sense Is Surprisingly Common In Animals [View all]

Fruit flies can detect magnetic fields, and the way they do it suggests the capacity is widespread in the animal kingdom, not a rare anomaly.

STEPHEN LUNTZ
Freelance Writer

Feb 23, 2023 4:38 AM

Many migratory species use the Earth’s magnetic field to keep their journeys on track. Now a study of a very non-migratory animal, the Drosophila fruit fly, shows the same capacity exists in some unexpected places. Perhaps humans are the rare ones because we don’t have this capability; if so, why?

In the quest for survival, access to information about the world, particularly information your rivals lack, is exceptionally valuable. So it is not surprising animals have developed an astonishing array of ways to observe the world around them. Magnetic fields are one of these, but before humanity’s invention of powerful electromagnets these were generally very weak. The effort required to detect them was much greater than for light or sound.

Consequently, biologists thought that only those animals that really needed to know their place on Earth – migratory pigeons or turtles for example – had exploited magnetoreception. However, a paper in Nature calls this into question.

The possibility that Drosophila are capable of magnetoreception was raised in 2015 with the identification of a MagR protein produced by the flies that orientates itself to align with magnetic fields.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/a-magnetic-sixth-sense-is-surprisingly-common-in-animals-67664