A contrast-enhanced image of an agar plate showing the tracks that worms carved on the surface while migrating towards a magnet placed beneath the solid circle (top). The control circle (bottom) is in dashed lines. Worms began in the middle of the plate.ANDRES VIDAL-GADEAScientists have known for decades that many animals—including birds and sea turtles—use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate over long distances, but understanding how they do so remains a mystery.
In 2015, a group from the University of Texas at Austin reported in eLife that a tiny nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, orients to Earth’s magnetic field using a specific pair of neurons. The findings raised the possibility that C. elegans might be an appropriate model system to dig deeper into how animals sense magnetic fields. But earlier this month (April 13) in a comment published in eLife, researchers from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria describe unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the results of the 2015 study.
“Studying animal magnetoreception is really difficult,” says Miriam Goodman, a sensory biologist at Stanford University who is not affiliated with either group. “I think that we will remain in a situation where we have passionate disagreement until ...
