Way To Go

Half-awake on Sunday morning, I caught a snippet of a radio item where they were discussing recent research into animals' sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field. They are realising that this is a much more widespread phenomenon than previously thought. As an aside, they said someone has done research to show that dogs poo in a N-S direction more frequently than would happen by chance (why?!)

The real subject of the piece was migrating birds - which are known to use the earth's magnetic field to navigate. The abstract from the original paper is a masterpiece of science-speak: '[some birds have] a light-dependent magnetic compass. The mechanism of this compass has been suggested to rely on the quantum spin dynamics of photoinduced radical pairs in cryptochrome flavoproteins located in [their] retinas'

The 'quantum spin dynamics' refers, I think, to the phenomenon of 'quantum entanglement', where a change in a particle in one place causes a corresponding change in a different particle in another place instantaneously, in zero time. This breaks the fundamental laws of physics laid out by Einstein. Information cannot pass from one place to another in zero time, because nothing can travel from place to place faster than the speed of light. But it does

And all this is going on in the retina, at the back of the eye, of a robin, because that is the birds they used for their research (robins are migratory across some of their distribution, apparently; I never knew that). This research is ongoing; so far they have shown that chemicals in the retina respond to magnetic fields when combined with light in the lab. Exactly how this works in the bird is still uncertain. But it does

Bees are also known to be sensitive to the earth's magnetic field, and use it to help them navigate. The mechanism is almost certainly different but is - as one scientist elegantly put it - 'enigmatic'. There are granules of magnetically active iron compounds in a bees abdomen; they are probably involved. That's about all that is known

I don't think these bees are doing anything to do with magnetic fields (but who knows!). They string themselves across open spaces like this when they plan to build wax in the space. Sometimes it is just a single skein of individual bees, linked hand-to-hand like trapeze artists. But I have never discovered any reason why they do it. Just something else we don't know

So many questions. The more research we do the more questions we have. It's a paradox. Maybe take the dog for a walk