# 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.
- Title: Seabirds Can Get Jet-Lagged Flying Home Across Oceans
- Summary: Manx shearwaters misjudge the Sun's position after long flights, skewing their biological clock and navigational course.
- Keywords: manx shearwaters, jet lag, sun compass, bird navigation, patrick lewin, university of oxford, animal behavior, Ars Technica
- Source: Ars Technica — https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/seabirds-racing-home-over-the-ocean-can-get-jet-lagged
- Published: 2026-10-31T11:15:26+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: manx shearwaters, jet lag, sun compass, bird navigation, patrick lewin, university of oxford, animal behavior, science
## 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.
## Key takeaway

Manx shearwaters experience jet lag while crossing ocean time zones, causing minor navigational errors that bend their sun-based flight path.