Centre for Animal Movement Research, Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, SE 223 62 Lund, Sweden
Centre for Animal Movement Research, Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, SE 223 62 Lund, Sweden.
J Exp Biol. 2019 Mar 11;222(Pt 5):jeb196469. doi: 10.1242/jeb.196469.
Several invertebrate and vertebrate species have been shown to align their body relative to the geomagnetic field. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the adaptive significance of magnetic body alignment outside the context of navigation. However, experimental evidence to investigate alternative hypotheses is still limited. We present a new setup to track the preferential body alignment relative to the geomagnetic field in captive animals using computer vision. We tested our method on three species of migratory songbirds and provide evidence that they align their body with the geomagnetic field. We suggest that this behaviour is involved in the underlying mechanism for compass orientation and calibration, which may occur near to sunrise and sunset periods. Our method could easily be extended to other species and used to test a large set of hypotheses to explain the mechanisms behind the magnetic body alignment and the magnetic sense in general.
已经有几种无脊椎动物和脊椎动物被证明会根据地磁场来调整自己的身体方向。许多假说被提出，以解释在导航背景之外，生物体对地磁的感应具有适应性意义。然而，用于验证这些替代假说的实验证据仍然有限。我们提出了一种新的方法，利用计算机视觉技术来跟踪圈养动物相对于地磁场的身体偏好方向。我们在三种迁徙鸣禽上测试了我们的方法，并提供了它们会根据地磁场来调整身体方向的证据。我们推测这种行为可能与罗盘定位和校准的潜在机制有关，这种机制可能发生在日出和日落前后。我们的方法可以很容易地扩展到其他物种，并用于测试大量假说，以解释生物体对地磁的感应及其背后的机制。
