WIKIMEDIA, DMITRIY KONSTANINOVThe long journeys of European eels (Anguilla anguilla) from the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean to European rivers and streams have baffled scientists for more than a century. But the eels may be helped along their winding trajectories by employing an uncommon sense: magnetoreception.
In Current Biology on Thursday (April 13), researchers reported that juvenile eels use magnetic fields to guide the direction they’re heading. “The eels oriented in a manner that would increase their entrainment into the Gulf Stream system,” Lewis Naisbett-Jones, who led the study while he was a student at Aberystwyth University in the U.K., told NPR.
Naisbett-Jones collected young A. anguilla and put them in a tank. He then subjected the fish to various magnetic fields and watched which way they swam. A magnetic field simulating what the animals would experience in the Sargasso Sea led the fish southwestward, while a magnetic field mimicking the northwest Atlantic caused them to head northeastward. In both situations, the responses would have aimed the fish toward the Gulf ...
