Loggerhead turtles are able to sense Earth’s magnetic field in two ways, but it wasn’t clear which sense the animals use to detect the magnetic field when navigating using the magnetic map they are born with. Now researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reveal in the Journal of Experimental Biology that hatchling loggerhead turtles feel Earth’s magnetic map to tell them where they are on their epic migration routes.
Mystery of how turtles read their magnetic map solved—they feel the magnetism
