I never thought of this:
A study of nearly 200 strandings of healthy grey whales over the past 30 years has found that the animals are four times more likely to strand themselves during solar storms.
Jesse Granger at Duke University in North Carolina and her colleagues think that radio frequency noise produced by the storms interferes with the magnetic compass of whales, preventing them from sensing direction.
But her team has shown only a correlation between the two events, Granger stresses. “This is not direct evidence,” she says.
We still know little about how whales navigate in largely featureless oceans during their long migrations. It is likely that they use magnetoreception as many other animals do, but this is difficult to demonstrate.
To investigate, Granger and her team looked at 186 instances where individual grey whales with no signs of any injury or interaction with people had become stranded, presumably due to navigational errors. They found strandings were twice as likely on days with more sunspots. [NewScientist (25 February 2020)]
Assuming they got this right, it makes a lot of sense, of course. Sunspots are magnetic in nature:
Sunspots are dark splotches that mark cooler patches on the solar surface. They correlate with areas of intense magnetic activity that are breeding grounds for violent outbursts of matter and radiation from our star. If it weren’t for the protective hull of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, these solar flares and coronal mass ejections would rapidly fry life on our planet. [NewScientist (14 September 2013)]
But I wouldn’t have guessed the intensity at this range could vary so much as to confuse, perhaps even blind those creatures using magnetoreceptors for navigation.
In philosophy, one of the subjects of contention is whether or not we can know the sensations that another creature is experiencing, with the iconic example being the sonar-locating bat. I’d add whales to the list. Do their magnetoreceptors still detect the sun when they’re at depth, chasing their meals?
Oh, OK, grey whales are baleen whales, meaning they are filter feeders mostly eating plankton. Still, I had to have the poetic touch, no?
