ENHG Lecture April 20: Quantum birds: The magnetic sense of night-migratory songbirds with Dr. Henrik Mouritsen

Dear members: as usual, this lecture will take place over Zoom at 7:30 pm, and a link will be emailed to everyone registered beforehand. You are welcome to sign in as of 7:00 pm to meet fellow members. Looking forward to seeing you there!

About the Lecture: Migratory birds can use a magnetic compass to find their way, but how do they sense the reference direction provided by the geomagnetic field? In the past years, evidence has mounted that migratory birds use a light-dependent, radical pair-based mechanism to sense the axis of the geomagnetic field lines (for a review, see Nature  558, 50-59). Recently, we showed that the magnetic compass of night-migratory birds is sensitive to anthropogenic electromagnetic field disturbances being ca. 1000 times weaker than the current WHO guideline limits (Nature 509, 353-356). This result could be significant in relation to migratory bird conservation measures and strongly indicates that the basic sensory mechanism underlying the magnetic compass of night-migratory songbirds should be based on quantum mechanical principles rather than classical physics. Neuroanatomical data have shown that magnetic compass information is detected in the eye and then processed in a small part of the so-called thalamofugal visual pathway terminating in the visual processing centre “Cluster N”. When Cluster N is deactivated, migratory European Robins can no longer use their magnetic compass, whereas their star compass and sun compass abilities are unaffected (Nature 461, 1274-1277). Thus, we are starting to get an understanding of how magnetic compass sensing works in migratory birds. Very recently, we have been able to show that a specific molecule from night-migratory birds is indeed magnetically sensitive based on a readical-pair mechanism (Nature, in press). In my talk, I will bring all this information together and present how night-migratory songbirds sense and use magnetic information to navigate with exquisite precision over thousands of kilometres.

Henrik Mouritsen: Henrik Mouritsen is a full professor of Neurosensory sciences at the University of Oldenburg. The long-distance navigational abilities of animals have fascinated humans for centuries and challenged scientists for decades. How does a migratory bird with a brain weighing less than 1 gram circumnavigate the globe with a precision unobtainable by human navigators before the emergence of GPS satellites? To answer these questions, multi-disciplinary approaches are needed. My group and its collaborators use mathematical modelling, physics, quantum chemistry, molecular biology, neurobiology, histology, computer simulations and newly developed laboratory equipment in combination with behavioral experiments and analyses of field data to achieve a better understanding of the behavioral and physiological mechanisms of long distance navigation in birds. In recent years, our main focus has been on unravelling the mechanisms underlying the magnetic senses in birds.