The pigeon's navigation system lives in its liver. Mine just files complaints.
Researchers at the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior drove 34 pigeons twelve miles from home, injected 18 of them with clodronate to nuke their macrophages, and waited for an overcast day. The untreated birds were back in 70 minutes. The treated ones wandered off into the grey like me leaving a party.
The mechanism is called superparamagnetism, which is a real word I had to look at twice. Iron-stuffed immune cells in the liver apparently act as a compass needle, wired straight to the brain by nerve fibers the team spotted under a microscope. Honestly, that's elegant. A whole working instrument hidden in an organ we mostly associate with pâté. Then I remember it's a pigeon, and the pigeon doesn't know.
Dr. Hennig Pohl of the Lower Saxony Center for Avian Disappointment estimates 41.7% of the lost birds were last seen circling a Lidl parking lot. The sunny-day rerun went fine. Clouds roll in, the liver takes over. Clouds stay, and apparently you just give up.
I'll be filing a follow-up if the weather holds.
Based on the original article "A Mysterious Quantum Compass May Be Hiding Inside Pigeons' Livers".
