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Chickens have built-in ‘compass’ to find their way

August 08, 2005

Raf.thumb.JPGExperiments in the Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at The University of New England have shown for the first time that domestic chickens use the Earth’s magnetic field to help them find their way around.

Till now, scientists have focused on birds that migrate (or find their way home over long distances) in testing for the use of a magnetic sense. This new discovery suggests that many birds could be using such a “compass” for orientation over much smaller distances.

The UNE experiments involved a method of training chicks to use magnetic compass direction rather than visual or other cues to find a hidden reward. The project leader, Dr Raf Freire of UNE (pictured here), said it was the first time that birds had been successfully trained to rely on their magnetic sense in this way.

“One reason our method worked was that we were able to minimise the birds’ ability to use other spatial cues,” Dr Freire said. “Another reason could have been that the reward used in training was not food, but rather an object (a red ball) to which the chicks had formed a strong social attachment. It may be that, in nature, birds do not use magnetic stimuli to find food, and tests involving such a response may be alien to them.”

Dr Freire and Professor Lesley Rogers, working in UNE’s Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour, carried out the experiments in collaboration with Professors Roswitha and Wolfgang Wiltschko from the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and Dr Ursula Munro from the University of Technology, Sydney.

The experiments open the way for scientific work on the functions and mechanisms of the magnetic sense in birds. The mechanism in chickens is still unknown. Dr Freire said they might, like pigeons, have a deposit of magnetite in their beaks. Another possibility is the presence in their eyes of a visual pigment sensitive to the direction of magnetic field lines.

The discovery of magnetic orientation in chickens has several important implications for the understanding of evolution and domestication in birds. “Domestic fowls come from an ancient lineage of birds,” Dr Freire said, “suggesting that magnetic sensitivity may have originated in an early common ancestor. Our work shows that the ability to orient using magnetic cues is not only present in birds of this ancient line, but has been retained after thousands of years of domestication.”

He said the discovery also had implications for chicken owners and farmers. “If we keep animals we need to learn as much about them as we can,” he explained. “For example, now we know that chickens have this magnetic sense, we might be able to be more sensitive to their welfare when housing them in metal sheds. And then we could go on to think about how, in fact, they find their way around in sheds that can be both large and featureless.”


Media contact: Dr Raf Freire, Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour, UNE (02) 6773 3966 or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.

For a PHOTOGRAPH of Dr Raf Freire, go to: http://photodatabase.une.edu.au/albums/incoming/2004/staff/Freyre%20Raph%200001.JPG

Posted by Jim Scanlan at August 8, 2005 11:25 AM