New Study Fuels Debate About Source of Birds' Magnetic Sense | The Scientist Magazine®
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Un article parlant d'une parution controversée qui semble indiquer que les oiseaux (des rouge gorges dans l'étude) possèdent des protéines sensibles au champ magnétique dans les yeux, leur permettant donc de s'orienter en fonction du champ magnétique terrestre.
Beaucoup de prudence sur ces propos, puisqu'il semble manquer pas mal d'informations sur le travail mené par l'équipe :
“It’s a very important step to show that this cryptochrome 4 actually can perceive light and then become magnetically sensitive,” says Rachel Muheim, a zoologist and magnetoreception researcher at Lund University in Sweden who was not involved in this work. She says that in her view Cry4 has already emerged in the wider literature as the most likely candidate in avian navigation, but “there are a number of experiments that can’t be explained” by the mechanism the new study focuses on and that aren’t addressed in the paper, she adds. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions.”