From Ars Technica · · 1m 50s
Seabirds Can Get Jet-Lagged Flying Home Across Oceans
Manx shearwaters misjudge the Sun's position after long flights, skewing their biological clock and navigational course.
In brief
Manx shearwaters misjudge the Sun's position after long flights, skewing their biological clock and navigational course. Manx shearwaters experience jet lag while crossing ocean time zones, causing minor navigational errors that bend their sun-based flight path. Originally reported by Ars Technica.
Seabirds Suffer From Jet Lag
A new Science study shows Manx shearwaters get jet-lagged when traveling across time zones over the ocean.
Birds of the Atlantic
Lead author Patrick Lewin describes Manx shearwaters as pigeon-sized birds closely related to albatrosses. Many breed in Wales.
“They are white underneath and black on top, but they have very long wings, and they are closely related to albatross.”
Navigating by the Sun
Shearwaters use an internal map sense alongside a Sun compass to find their way back to coastal burrows.
Internal Clock Calibration
The birds recalibrate their internal biological clocks each day at dusk and dawn to track the Sun.
Shifting Out of Sync
For every degree of longitude covered, a bird's clock shifts four minutes, causing directional errors east or west.
Twenty Years of Tracking
Researchers analyzed GPS data gathered since 2004 from 3,688 foraging trips taken by over 1,000 birds.
Straight Homeward Flights
Scientists isolated fast, straight homeward flights, comparing actual flight paths against predictions based on internal clock shifts.
Small Shifts Alter Direction
Time shifts reached up to one hour, causing shearwaters to veer off course across 335 ocean flights.
“About an hour is pretty much the maximum that we observed.”
Minor Extra Distances
Navigational errors averaged roughly seven degrees, adding only five kilometers to a typical 1,000-kilometer homeward flight.
Dual Navigation Systems
Birds following coastlines still drifted slightly, suggesting shearwaters rely on both compass directions and visual landmarks simultaneously.
Potential Human Applications
Researchers hope studying how animals cope with jet lag could eventually inspire ways to mitigate human jet lag.
“So maybe we could take some inspiration from these animals that are constantly experiencing jet lag and see if there are ways that we can mitigate jet lag affecting humans.”
The main idea
Manx shearwaters experience jet lag while crossing ocean time zones, causing minor navigational errors that bend their sun-based flight path.
