Research on how animals move around the world helps determine the influence of human activity

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But how? And because? A new study from researchers at Western’s Advanced Center for Avian Research (AFAR), home to the world’s first hypobaric climate wind tunnel for bird flight, explores a region of the brain called the N group that migratory birds use to perceive Earth’s magnetic field. The team found that the region is very flexibly activated, meaning these birds have the ability to process or ignore geomagnetic information, just as you can pay attention to music when you’re interested or tune out when you’re not.

More specifically, the research team led by psychology PhD candidate Madeleine Brodbeck and AFAR co-director Scott MacDougall-Shackleton studied white-throated sparrows and found that they could activate the N group at night when motivated to migrate ( to avoid prey and fly). during colder periods) and cause it to become inactive when they were resting at a layover 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 for activating the geomagnetic compass, especially for songbirds when they migrate at night,” Brodbeck said. “Almost all of the previous work on this specific brain function was done in a lab in Europe, so it was great to replicate it in a North American bird like the white-throated sparrow.”

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 in this way 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. And more importantly, we need to know what we, as humans, are doing that might influence them,” MacDougall-Shackleton said.

The findings were published in the journal, European Journal of Neuroscience.

“Birds don’t just use their magnetic compass. We know that they also pay attention to the Sun and the stars for signs. And we also know that things like lights at night, or windows in buildings, and all these things that we put on the world stops their migrations,” said MacDougall-Shackleton. “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 need to do to minimize our impact.”