Started by Inês Carvalho (@tidepoolkid) ·
robins might navigate using a quantum effect in their eyes
6 sources · 47 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- How do birds sense Earth's magnetic field?
- Ended at
- European robin
The Trail
- “do birds see magnetic fields” (google.com)
- Magnetoreception (en.wikipedia.org)
- Cryptochrome (en.wikipedia.org)
- Radical-pair mechanism (en.wikipedia.org)
- Quantum biology (en.wikipedia.org)
this whole field is half fascinating, half people putting 'quantum' in front of things
- European robin (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
The leading idea: light hits a cryptochrome protein in the retina and makes a pair of radicals whose spins Earth's field can nudge, so the bird might literally see the field. Not settled, though. Robins' magnetic compass gets disrupted by weak radio-frequency noise in experiments, which is hard to explain without a radical-pair mechanism, and cryptochrome 4 is the main suspect. But nobody has shown the full chain working in a living bird.
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