Dancing Navigation: Research Fellow Katrina Phillips Weighs in on a Turtle-devised GPS System

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A new study published in Nature finds that baby turtles use “dancing” as a GPS system to find their food. To understand these findings’ broader implications, a NewScientist article and the CBC's Quirks and Quarks podcast asked Katrina Phillips—a postdoctoral research fellow in the College of Natural Science’s Department of Environmental Conservation who studies sea turtles and long-distance migration—to weigh in on how baby loggerhead turtles use magnetic fields to navigate their environment.  

The study, led by Ken Lohmann at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Kayla Goforth at Texas A&M University, examined juvenile loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) who were placed into tanks with two separate magnetic fields surrounded by coil systems, replicating those in their natural habitats.  

Turtles rely on two distinct geomagnetic senses: a map sense for location awareness and a compass sense for directional movement. As soon as the turtles were in a magnetic field they associated with food, they began to dance in anticipation, a behavior reminiscent of the renowned Pavlov experiment. 

The NewScientist article features Phillips, who explains why she is excited by this study’s findings: 

“It’s a new way of thinking about how turtles are using the magnetic field to navigate,” says Katrina Phillips at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “What’s really fascinating is we still don’t understand how they’re even perceiving the magnetic field. So, this is getting at what is going on mechanistically.” 

— NewScientist 

Learn more in Nature, NewScientist, and CBC's Quirks and Quarks.