NZ scientists expose mystery of pigeon navigation

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NZ scientists crack another layer in mystery of pigeon navigation

British Royal Society to publish findings this week

AUCKLAND 24 June 2009: Ground-breaking work by Professor Michael Walker, a co-director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, the Māori Centre of Research Excellence, and Dr Cordula Mora at the University of Auckland showing how pigeons navigate precisely from unfamiliar locations is being published internationally this week in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The remarkable ability of trained homing pigeons to navigate home even after being released at distant unfamiliar locations has long defied scientific explanation. Indeed, even pigeons taken under anaesthesia to unfamiliar sites have shown themselves adept at charting a course home.

But while it has been shown that the birds are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, no-one has previously been able to determine precisely just how the birds might use the field to determine their position.

Reviewing data of birds homing to three lofts in Germany, the New Zealand scientists used graphical software to map the directions in which the birds were flying when they left release sites against magnetic field intensity.

Researchers had previously been puzzled by a “release-site bias” phenomenon whereby pigeons often begin their flight by deviating from a direct line home. But the New Zealand team were able to show that the birds were simply responding to local variations, or ripples, in the surface of the area’s magnetic field. The birds later established courses towards home and updated these courses en route.

Importantly, Professor Walker says, their work implies that the pigeons are able at the outset to effectively chart a course using the magnetic field.

“These results are important because they provide evidence in support of a model for use of the earth’s magnetic field to determine the magnetic equivalents of geographic latitude and longitude – a geomagnetic positioning system invented long before the GPS satellites were launched into space,” he says.

A recognised leader in the field of animal navigation, Professor Walker, from the Whakatōhea iwi in the Bay of Plenty, has been published widely in the world’s leading scientific journals for related discoveries. He was the first to extract magnetite, or lodestone, from yellowfin tuna and show how this could be used by migrating fish to navigate using the earth’s magnetic field.

He has been a co-director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga since 2002 and is a Professor and researcher in ecology, evolution and behaviour at the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) at the University of Auckland.
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Having completed her degree at the SBS, Dr Mora is currently an Assistant Research Professor at Bowling Green University in Ohio.

Editors note: The Royal Society journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, containing this paper is due to be published online at 00.01 (BST) Wednesday 24 June 2009.

Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga
Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga is New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence. It supports Māori scholars, community members and international academics in engaging in research and its applications. It accelerates the growth in numbers of Māori researchers conducting research in ways that genuinely engage with diverse Māori communities to benefit Māori and all New Zealanders.
www.maramatanga.co.nz

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