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. 2023 Nov;19(11):20230181.
doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2023.0181. Epub 2023 Nov 29.

Migratory bats are sensitive to magnetic inclination changes during the compass calibration period

William T Schneider  1 , Richard A Holland  1 , Oskars Keišs  2 , Oliver Lindecke  1   3
Affiliations

Migratory bats are sensitive to magnetic inclination changes during the compass calibration period

William T Schneider et al. Biol Lett. 2023 Nov.

Abstract

The Earth's magnetic field is used as a navigational cue by many animals. For mammals, however, there are few data to show that navigation ability relies on sensing the natural magnetic field. In night-time migrating bats, experiments demonstrating a role for the solar azimuth at sunset in the calibration of the orientation system suggest that the magnetic field is a candidate for their compass. Here, we investigated how an altered magnetic field at sunset changes the nocturnal orientation of the bat Pipistrellus pygmaeus. We exposed bats to either the natural magnetic field, a horizontally shifted field (120°), or the same shifted field combined with a reversal of the natural value of inclination (70° to -70°). We later released the bats and found that the take-off orientation differed among all treatments. Bats that were exposed to the 120° shift were unimodally oriented northwards in contrast to controls which exhibited a bimodal north-south distribution. Surprisingly, the orientation of bats exposed to both a 120° shift and reverse inclination was indistinguishable from a uniform distribution. These results suggest that these migratory bats calibrate the magnetic field at sunset, and for the first time, they show that bats are sensitive to the angle of magnetic inclination.

Keywords: animal migration; animal navigation; bats; magnetoreception; orientation; sunset calibration.

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Conflict of interest statement

We have no competing interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Sunset calibration sites (a) for control bats, which experienced the natural magnetic field, and for experimental bats, which experienced manipulated magnetic field conditions within a Helmholtz coil. Nightly take-off orientations under laboratory conditions on site for control bats (b), 120° horizontally shifted bats (c), and bats that experienced the horizontal 120° shift combined with a reversed magnetic inclination of −70° (d).
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