WESTMEYER/HELMHOLTZ ZENTRUM MÜNCHENHumans like to fancy ourselves advanced, but there’s at least one area where cockroaches, and even nematodes, seem to have us beat: magnetoreception, the ability to sense variations in magnetic fields. To add insult to injury, our best human minds haven’t yet been able to answer basic questions about how the sense—also shared by some amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals—works.
Joining the list now are zebrafish and medaka, as researchers reported in Nature Communications last month (February 23). Unlike in some animals, magnetoreception in the fish doesn’t require light to work.
The study is “a promising beginning,” writes Roswitha Wiltschko, a researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt who has studied magnetoreception in birds, in an email to The Scientist. “[T]o demonstrate [sensitivity to magnetic direction] in two species whose genetics are known is novel, and this might form a basis for future investigations.”
Animals as diverse as lobsters and pigeons are thought to use variations in Earth’s magnetic fields to orient themselves. One idea for how the sense might work is that magnetic fields could affect light-sensitive chemical reactions, possibly in structures in the retina known ...
