Trained pigeons can travel up to 1,000 kilometers (about 600 miles) to find their way home wherever they are released, day or night, rain or shine.
It is a skill that humans have been using since ancient times. And for nearly a century, scientists have known that magnetoreception plays a role in birds’ navigational cocktail.
A research team from the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior Wrote in this week’s Science Journal The main part of the secret to returning home using magnetic fields may lie in the liver of birds.
What did the study find?
The study explains how the “underlying mechanisms” of how the rock dove – or Columba livia – receives magnetic information appear to be numerous and are still being discovered.
Some physical connections in more intuitive places – such as the beak, eyes and brain – have already been identified.
“Here, we used physical, morphological, functional, and genomic assays to identify the presence of superparamagnetic macrophages in the liver,” the researchers wrote.
Macrophages are immune cells that break down old red blood cells. As part of this process, they deposit iron, which may allow them to respond to magnetic fields.
“We found that after macrophage depletion, pigeons flying in cloudy conditions lacked their normal orientation abilities,” he said.
When the Sun was visible, the birds’ orientation was unaffected, suggesting that visual and solar-based cues were one of the pigeons’ navigation methods.
But given the birds’ inability to navigate magnetically without the aid of their liver, the researchers concluded: “We propose that in homing pigeons, superparamagnetic macrophages in the liver are required for magnetic direction finding.”
What did the researchers say?
Martin Wikelski, Director Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior stated that “What appears to be ‘gut feeling’ in bird navigation may actually have a physical basis.”
The immune cells in question are located near nerve cells in the liver. Researchers estimate that in this way they can transmit data to the brains of pigeons.
“We did not at all expect that immune cells would act like sensors for magnetic fields. Our results reveal a previously unknown mechanism for magnetic perception in animals,” said Christian Kurts, director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Experimental Immunology at the University Hospital Bonn and co-senior author of the study.
Despite the surprise that the answer apparently lay in macrophages, scientists knew before the study that some organs were particularly worthy of study.
“We had some clues that the liver and spleen have magnetic properties, because they break down red blood cells and therefore accumulate a lot of iron in the body,” said first author Clivia Lisowski of the University of Bonn and University Hospital Bonn, who led the immunological work.
How the skills of homing pigeons have been known and used for millennia
It’s not clear when or how it all started, but humans have used pigeons’ homing abilities since ancient times.
Birds and their navigational skills appear in ancient cultures, whether it be the story of Noah’s Ark or in Greek mythology, where birds were portrayed as divine messengers connecting heaven and earth.
The ancient Greeks used pigeons to deliver news of Olympic winners and victories in battles. The Romans used pigeon networks to speed up communications across their vast military empire.
Even into more modern times, as technology began to steal their jobs, pigeons remained useful.
He helped give birth to the Reuters news agency. In 1850, Julius Reuter in Belgium used pigeons to carry news and stock prices between Brussels and Aachen, Germany because it was still the fastest means available.
In World War I, pigeons carried messages from the front lines to command posts and were considered legitimate targets for snipers.
In World War II, MI14(D), an obscure subsection of British military intelligence, ran operation columbaIt was named on the basis of the scientific name of the birds.
More than 16,000 pigeons that were previously being used by amateur sports fans were released in canisters into occupied France or other nearby countries. Locals were urged to fill out a questionnaire about German military strength and activities and other information about their area. They could then release the bird to carry intelligence back to Britain. The operation collected actionable information on German garrison locations, U-boat pens and coastal invasion defences, among other things.
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Edited by: Carl Sexton