Abstract: Billions of birds fly thousands of kilometers every year between their breeding and wintering grounds, helped by an extraordinary ability to detect the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. The biophysical sensory mechanism at the heart of this compass is thought to rely on magnetically sensitive, light-dependent chemical reactions in cryptochrome proteins in the eye. Thus far, no theoretical model has been able to account for the <5° precision with which migratory birds are able to detect the geomagnetic field vector. Here, using comp...
(read more)