2023-05-26 10:45:35
MADRID, 26 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Migratory birds have the ability to process or ignore geomagnetic information, just like we can pay attention to music when we like it or ignore it when we don’t.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario’s Advanced Center for Avian Research (AFAR) came to this conclusion after discovering that a region of the brain called the N group, which migratory birds use to sense Earth’s magnetic field, is activated very flexible. The study is published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.
Specifically, the research team led by PhD student Madeleine Brodbeck and AFAR co-director Scott MacDougall-Shackleton studied white-throated sparrows and found that could activate group N at night when motivated to migrate (to avoid prey and fly during colder periods) and leave it idle when they were resting at a stopover site.
This is the first demonstration of the functioning of this brain region in a North American bird species, as all previous research in this area has been completed in Europe.
“This region of the brain is very important to activate the geomagnetic compass, especially for songbirds when they migrate at night,” Brodbeck said. it’s a statement.
Probably first investigated and identified by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in the 1830s, Earth’s magnetic field has long fascinated physicists, aerospace engineers, and even science fiction writers such as Frank Herbert and Stephen King. . Brodbeck, a bird psychologist, is equally intrigued.
“It’s really fun to think about magnetic fields because they’re invisible to humans. We can’t see or feel them, but most animals sense them in some way.Brodbeck said. “For birds, using the Earth’s magnetic field to tell if they are going towards the pole or towards the equator is obviously very useful for orientation and migration. It’s amazing that they can activate their brain like this and we can’t.”
Understanding the physical mechanisms of how animals move through the world is a fundamentally important question for researchers, says MacDougall-Shackleton, a professor of psychology and a cognitive neuroscientist.
“If we want to understand bird migration or how other animals move from one place to another, we need to know how they do it. More importantly, we need to know what we, as humans, are doing. What could influence them?MacDougall-Shackleton said.
“Birds don’t just use their magnetic compass. We know that they also pay attention to the sun and the stars for cues. And we also know that things like lights at night or windows in buildings, and all these things that we put out in the world disrupts their migrations,” MacDougall-Shackleton said. “This type of basic research informs us and allows us to understand the full set of ways that animals perceive the world when they migrate and what we as humans perceive. we must do to minimize our impact.”
AFAR houses the world’s first hypobaric climate wind tunnel for bird flight.
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