ArticlePloS one2020
No evidence for the use of magnetic declination for migratory navigation in two songbird species.
Article in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Directionality range in Emlen funnels.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2026Pooled it
- Migratory birds can extract positional information from magnetic inclination and magnetic declination alone.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Avian navigation: the geomagnetic field provides compass cues but not a bicoordinate "map" plus a brief discussion of the alternative infrasound direction-finding hypothesis.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2024Review
- C. elegans is not a robust model organism for the magnetic sense.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Sense of doubt: inaccurate and alternate locations of virtual magnetic displacements may give a distorted view of animal magnetoreception ability.Communications biology · 2023Article
- No apparent effect of a magnetic pulse on free-flight behaviour in northern wheatears (Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- How might magnetic secular variation impact avian philopatry?Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Article
- Magnetic maps in animal navigation.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Determining the East-West position was a classical problem in human sea navigation until accurate clocks were manufactured and sailors were able to measure the difference between local time and a fixed reference to determine longitude. Experienced night-migratory songbirds can correct for East-West physical and virtual magnetic displacements to unknown locations. Migratory birds do not appear to possess a time-different clock sense; therefore, they must solve the longitude problem in a different way. We showed earlier that experienced adult (but not juvenile) Eurasian reed warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) can use magnetic declination (the difference in direction between geographic and magnetic North) to solve this problem when they were virtually displaced from Rybachy on the eastern Baltic coast to Scotland. In this study, we aimed to test how general this effect was. Adult and juvenile European robins (Erithacus rubecula) and adult garden warblers (Sylvia borin) under the same experimental conditions did not respond to this virtual magnetic displacement, suggesting significant variation in how navigational maps are organised in different songbird migrants.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.