Friday, August 11, 2006
Light Guides Flight Of Migratory Birds
Songbirds use multiple sources of directional cues to guide their seasonal migrations, including the Sun, star patterns, the earth's magnetic field, and sky polarized light patterns. To avoid navigational errors as cue availability changes with time of day and weather conditions, these "compass" systems must be calibrated to a common reference. Experiments over the last 30 years have failed to resolve the fundamental question of how migratory birds integrate multiple sources of directional information into a coherent navigational system.
Last autumn, Rachel Muheim, a postdoctoral associate in biology professor John Phillips' lab at Virginia Tech, captured Savannah sparrows in the Yukon before they headed south. She was able to demonstrate that the birds calibrate their magnetic compass based on polarized light patterns at sunset and sunrise.
The research appears in the Aug. 11, 2006, issue of Science, in the article, "Polarized Light Cues Underlie Compass Calibration in Migratory Songbirds," (Abstract) by Muheim, Phillips, and Suzanne Akesson.
technorati tags: songbirds, seasonal, migration, sun, star, patterns, earth, magnetic, field, sky, polarized, light, time, day, weather, compass, migratory, biology, sparrows, yukon, birds, research, science
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