A new study suggests that sharks use Earth’s electromagnetic field to navigate oceans. It is similar to how hikers rely on a compass while traveling. Sharks engage in “site fidelity” that allows them to travel long distances to reach the same places every year.
But how do they do it without any navigation gear? This question has baffled researchers for a long time. “How cool is it that a shark can swim 20,000 kilometers round trip in a three-dimensional ocean and get back to the same site? It really is mind-blowing. In a world where people use GPS to navigate almost everywhere, this ability is truly remarkable,” said Bryan Kellar, lead study author.
Sharks have ‘remarkable’ abilities
But scientists might finally have an answer. They explained that sharks have ‘remarkable’ abilities to use Earth’s electromagnetic fields to find their way. “It’s ‘nature’s GPS’,” Kellar notes.
Sharks have been known to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields for quite some time – which made researchers suspect for years that the cetaceans may be using it to navigate. While the hypothesis isn’t new, the latest study conclusively confirms the theory.
Are these abilities inherited?
The team captured bonnethead sharks and exposed them to electromagnetic conditions, similar to the conditions in their habitat. The sharks gathered positional data from artificial magnetic fields and began swimming in the direction of home.
“To orient towards home, these sharks must have some kind of a magnetic map sense — if I put you in the middle of nowhere you couldn’t point toward your house unless you knew where you were in relation to it, and that’s a map sense,” Keller explained.
Do sharks inherit the ability to map magnetic fields or they learn to do it over time? That’s what the team of scientists is trying to observe. But that’s not it. How sharks sense electromagnetic fields is also a mystery.
If the speculations are to be believed, electromagnetic fields invoke a protein in their retina. It is also said that sharks’ cells contain magnetic iron minerals that allow them to sense the magnetic field.
