How birds find their way … quantum mechanics?

Chemical reaction produces extra electrons affected by Earth’s magnetic field

In the moment after their plane was hit, there was no time to think, let alone radio their position. The four Royal Air Force crew members ditched their broken bomber and dropped into the North Sea. It was Feb. 23, 1942 — and it should have been their last day on Earth.

Floundering in the frigid water between England and Norway, the pilots released their last hope: a tiny, bedraggled carrier pigeon named Winkie. She had been inside a container the whole flight and was covered in oil from the crash. It wasn’t clear whether she would survive the 120-mile flight home, or know how to get there.

But a few hours later, Winkie showed up at the home of her owner, who notified British authorities in time to launch a rescue mission. Without her, the four men might never have been found in the vast ocean. So how did she do it? “We think they are using quantum mechanics to navigate,” said Daniel Kattnig, a researcher in the chemistry department at Oxford University. Kattnig works in a lab that studies radical pairs: a phenomenon in which atoms acquire extra electrons that are “entangled” with one another, each affecting the other’s motion even though they’re separated by space. It’s a field of science that is difficult to understand under the best of circumstances; imagine trying to figure it out with a bird brain.

But according to an increasingly popular theory, birds and other animals use a radical-pair-based compass to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing them to undertake great migrations without getting lost. It’s still unproven, but Kattnig and his colleagues just verified a key component: In a study in the New Journal of Physics on Thursday, they reported that the timing of these subatomic interactions makes them a good candidate to explain avian navigation.

“There are still many steps before we can say this for certain,” Kattnig said. But this is one step along the way.

In the early 1960s, a German graduate student named Wolfgang Wiltschko set out to prove that birds navigated based on radio signals from the stars. During his experiments, he locked robins in a steel room with a Hemholtz coil — a device that produces a uniform magnetic field — and found that the birds were reorienting themselves in response to it. He had accidentally demonstrated that magnetism, not radio waves, was at the heart of animal navigation.

Those results sent scientists on a frenzied search for animals’ magneto-receptors. They discovered iron particles in the beaks of pigeons and hens, magnetite in the noses of trout and other magnetic molecules in birds’ ear hairs.

Subsequent research found that some of those iron molecules were in immune cells rather than sensory ones, shaking up the migration-by-magnetic-molecules theory. But animal-navigation scholars already had another possible mechanism: the radical pairs that Kattnig studies.

It’s thought that light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes — which have been found in the retinas of birds, butterflies, fruit flies, frogs, humans and other creatures — are at the center of the mystery. When light strikes the proteins, it creates radical pairs that begin to spin in synchrony. In other words, they’re entangled.

The chemical reaction lasts for only a few microseconds, but Kattnig’s research shows that it’s long enough for the Earth’s magnetic field to modulate the quality and direction of the electrons’ spin.

This suggests to Kattnig and his colleagues that sensors in birds’ eyes survey the spin state of various radical pairs and then signal the results to the brain, allowing birds to more or less “see” the Earth’s magnetic field as they fly through it.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE Pigeons have been used throughout history to carry messages and have performed amazing feats of navigation to deliver.