A Sixth Sense

Maybe Magneto's had it right all along, just not in the ways we thought.

'You're Invisible, but I'll Eat You Anyway.' Secrets of Snow-Diving Foxes

 . . . When they looked at each other's notes, the researchers saw a pattern: For some reason, Czech foxes prefer to jump in a particular direction — toward the northeast. (To be more precise, it's about 20 degrees off "magnetic north" — the "N" on your compass.) As the video above says, most of the time, most foxes miss their targets and emerge covered in snow and (one presumes) a little embarrassed. But when they pointed in that particular northeasterly direction, Ed writes, "they killed on 73 percent of their attacks." If they reversed direction, and jumped exactly the opposite way, they killed 60 percent of the time. But in all other directions — east, south, west, whatever — they sucked. Only 18 percent of those jumps were successful. . . .

Cerveny believes that foxes have "a magnetic sense." Not only can they see, hear, touch, taste and smell like we do, they've got an extra gift. They can sense the Earth's magnetic field. There are birds, sharks, turtles and ants that can do the same thing. But the fox is the first animal we know of to use this sense to hunt. . . . 

The flashlight beam is analogous to the downward slope of the Earth's magnetic field in the Northern Hemisphere. While I'm not sure what that means, apparently animals know how to measure the distance between themselves and that sort of magnetic beam. So, when a fox hears a sound under the snow, she searches "for that sweet spot," as Ed puts it, "where the angle of the sound hitting [her] ears matches the slope of the Earth's magnetic field." When the two are in alignment, then — like a treasure map marked "X" — she knows exactly where to go! And 73 percent of the time, she's exactly right. . . . 

Everyone Poops, but Dogs Do It with Magnetism

 . . . According to researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, the pooch might be aiming to poop along a north-south axis that lines up with the Earth's magnetic field.

In the they report that after watching 70 dogs do their business over a two-year period (1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations), they reached the conclusion that they (the dogs) preferred to do their No. 2s "aligned along the North-south axis under calm [magnetic field] conditions."

And when the magnetic field is in flux, "this directional behavior was abolished" — which might sometimes explain why your dog just can't seem to settle on a place to go.

One might ask why this discovery might be important.

Well, according to the Czech researchers, this is the first time a "measurable, predictable behavioral reaction" to the magnetic field's fluctuation has been demonstrated in mammals. And that, in turn, could mean that other behavior scientists need to "revise their former experiments and observations and consider the phenomenon in their current and future experiments." It also might mean that "biologists and physicians [should] seriously reconsider effects magnetic storms might pose on organisms." . . .