Science Mag:
Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional—albeit hidden—sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth’s magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain.
The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies “magnetoreception” and navigation in turtles. She notes that dogs’ navigational abilities have been studied much less compared with migratory animals such as birds. “It’s an insight into how [dogs] build up their picture of space,” adds Richard Holland, a biologist at Bangor University who studies bird navigation.
There were already hints that dogs—like many animals, and maybe even humans—can perceive Earth’s magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots. But stationary alignment isn’t the same thing as navigation.
In the new study, Burda’s graduate student, Kateřina Benediktová, initially put video cameras and GPS trackers on four dogs and took them on trips into the forest. The dogs would scamper off to chase the scent of an animal for 400 meters on average. The GPS tracks showed two types of behavior during their return trips to their owner (see map, below). In one, dubbed tracking, a dog would retrace its original route, presumably following the same scent. In the other behavior, called scouting, the dog would return along a completely new route, bushwhacking without any backtracking.
When Benediktová showed the data to Burda, her Ph.D. adviser, he noticed a curious feature: In the middle of a scouting run, the dog would stop and run for about 20 meters along a north-south axis (see video, below) before it began to navigate back. Those short runs looked like an alignment along the magnetic field, but Benediktová didn’t have enough data to be sure.
