Study Reveals Pigeons Use Liver as Built-in GPS for Navigation
How do pigeons navigate their way back home? Study finds built-in GPS in their liver, solving a 100-year-old mystery
Image: The Times Of India
A recent study published in Science reveals that pigeons navigate using magnetic signals detected by specialized immune cells in their liver. This discovery sheds light on how these birds find their way home over long distances, especially when visual cues are absent.
- 01Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Bonn discovered that iron-rich macrophages in pigeons' livers act as a biological compass.
- 02Experiments showed that pigeons without these liver cells struggled to navigate on cloudy days, while normal pigeons returned home successfully.
- 03The liver cells are located near nerve fibers, suggesting a pathway for transmitting magnetic information to the brain.
- 04This finding may have implications for understanding navigation in other animals, such as sea turtles and migratory birds.
- 05The research highlights the complexity of animal navigation, indicating multiple systems likely work together.
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Pigeons, often underestimated for their navigation skills, have been found to possess a unique biological compass located in their liver. A study published in the journal Science by researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Bonn reveals that specialized immune cells known as macrophages, which accumulate iron, play a crucial role in how pigeons navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. In experiments, trained homing pigeons were released from a distance of over 20 kilometers, with those lacking these liver cells struggling to find their way home on cloudy days, while normal pigeons successfully returned. This discovery suggests that these liver cells may act as a backup navigation system when visual cues are unavailable. Furthermore, the proximity of these cells to nerve fibers hints at a potential communication pathway to the brain. This finding opens new avenues for understanding navigation in various animals, emphasizing the complexity of biological navigation systems.
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