How robins are pointing the way to military navigation

MY STORY IN THE TIMES TODAY: The ability of migratory songbirds to fly huge distances at night without getting lost is now at the heart of aUS Army research project into how troops and military vehicles could fight wars without satellite navigation. In any future conflict, China’s growing anti-satellite capability would threaten America’s space-based global positioning system (GPS) on which every arm of the US military depends for long-range navigation. The Pentagon is funding research to find alternative ways of navigation as a direct result of anti-satellite weapons in the hands of potential adversaries. China has its own global navigation system, a network of 30 satellites called BeiDou. Turning to nature is now one of the Pentagon’s options being examined. Migratory birds, such as the robin, have a protein called cryptochrome 4 in their retinas which, it was revealed recently, enables them to sense the Earth’s magnetic field and chart their course from one country to another. “Night migratory songbirds are remarkably proficient navigators. Flying alone and often over great distances, they use various directional cues including a light-dependent magnetic compass,” an article in Nature magazine reported last month. This confirmation of a special bird’s-eye view of the world during flight spurred the US Army to intensify research which had already been going on for decades. The army and the other US military services have been involved in multiple research programmes to see how birds, insects, fish and sea turtles exploit the magnetic field to navigate in the hope that nature’s ways can be copied for human use. The discovery that the protein in a migratory bird’s retinas is sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field “could be key to army navigation of both autonomous and manned vehicles where GPS is unavailable, compromised or denied”, the US Army research laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland, said. The research findings in the Nature article carried out by the universities of Oxford and Oldenburg in Germany involving European robins were partly funded by the US Army’s combat capabilities development command. Researchers studying the robin managed to synthesise the genetic code of the protein and then harvest it. “This new knowledge is an exciting first step toward potential navigation systems that would rely only on the magnetic field of Earth, unaffected by weather or light levels,” Stephanie McElhinny , a programme manager at the US army research laboratory, said. To help prove the discovery, the two universities’ research teams also carried out similar studies of chickens and pigeons which have the same protein in their eyes. But the protein in these birds did not have the quality of magnetic sensitivity found in the robin.