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I wonder if the Earths magnetic field flipping every half a Million years affects birds untowardly? Or have they evolved to deal with it?
by everyone 9y ago
I wonder if the Earths magnetic field flipping every half a Million years affects birds untowardly? Or have they evolved to deal with it?
- justinhj 9y agoA totally uneducated guess is that they will automatically handle the transition. In experiments with humans wearing glasses to vertically flip their visuals they start to see the flipped view as normal after a few days. No doubt birds would be the same. There’s also the evidence that birds have not gone extinct
- webbles 9y agoI think it would be hard to evolve to protect against something that only happens every half million years. We're probably going to need to observe the behavioral changes the next time it happens to have any clue.
- throwaway2048 9y agolots of subpopulations of many migratory birds dont infact migrate, or migrate very short distances. May play a role in their recovery.
- doomjunky 9y agoI'm not an expert in this domain, but my guess is that a flip of the eaths magnetic field is not instantaneous, but it takes over a few bird generations.
- gilgoomesh 9y agoIf the images in the article are accurate, the birds don't really see the polarity of the field, merely the alignment, so they don't really see "north", "east", "south" and "west", merely "latitudinal" or "longitudinal". They would probably combine with sunlight to get the real orientation – an approach which would continue to work with a flipped magnetic field.
- andai 9y agoIf you have 3D polarized glasses from the cinema you can go outside on a sunny day see this alignment in the sky. It's really cool, highly recommended.
- spacehome 9y agoYou can see it with the naked eye, too, near the center of your vision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]