Some turtles flip when a magnetic field suggests when feeding
Gofth et al., Nature (2025)
Baby Loggerhead When the turtades expect “dance” food, the behavior used by researchers to investigate browsing skills. By learning to connect with a food with a magnetic field, this nice screen stated that the sea turtles have two different geomagnetic senses to help navigate through the journeys of the epic ocean.
“The tortoise dance behavior is a strange model when the foods of the sea captive is explained when the food comes from above,” says Ken Lohmann At North Carolina University in Chapel Hill. “They would be very excited and they would raise his head to come and swim and often fall food immediately, flipping and spinning the faucets.”
Lohmann and his colleagues realized that the turtle browsing that works can be able to reveal this behavior. Juvenile Loggerhead set up sea turtles (Caretta Caretta) created magnetic fields in tanks surrounded by coil systems irrigaterepeating their natural habitats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu5upzquuam
Young people spent the same time in two magnetic fields, but only one of them were fed. Soon, when they were in a magnetic field that connected with food, they began to take the tortoise, reminiscent of what they learned Ivan Pavlovfamous dog experiment. “We demonstrated that turtles can learn to know magnetic fields,” says teammates Kayla gooforth Texas A & M University.
Researchers then reproduced the magnetic field near the Cape Islands, the area that Loggerheads tend to hit Turn southwest migrating. The team proved that young turtles did that too. Then the researchers trained other turtles to tie the Cape Verde area with food.
Some of the ideas for some animals sensible magnetic fields It is a complex set of chemical reactions that affect the magnetic field of the Earth.
To try to influence such a system, he used the supplemental magnetic field that the Group osciles the frequency of radio waves, which should hinder this cascade of chemical reactions.
Whether the oscillator area is turned on, the turtle may perceive the magnetic signature below Cape Verde and will dance, which suggests that the sense of the map is not subject to this mechanism of chemical reception. But he turned the fields of oscillators in random directions than in the southwest.
Scientists tested this behavior through some experiments made of many tanks
Gofth et al., Nature (2025)
“That is, there are two different magnetic senses in the tortoises: used in the sense of the map, which is used in the sense of the compass,” says Lohmann says. “The simplest explanation of the magnetic map that will not depend on this chemical process, but it makes sense of magnetic compass.”
“The meaning of the magnetic map is a positive sense, it is like a GPS, and the meaning of their compass is the way,” says Goforth. “This is probably how they are returning to important ecological locations, such as feeding grounds and nest sites.”
“The turtle is a new way of thinking how they use magnetic fields,” he says Katrina Phillips Massachusetts at the University of Amherst. “It’s really fascinating yet we still don’t understand how they perceive magnetic fields. So this is getting what is happening in the mechanism.”
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