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A magnetic map leads juvenile European eels to the Gulf Stream

Naisbett-Jones, Lewis C., Putman, Nathan F., Stephenson, Jessica F., Ladak, Sam ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0275-0927 and Young, Kyle A. 2017. A magnetic map leads juvenile European eels to the Gulf Stream. Current Biology 27 (8) , pp. 1236-1240. 10.1016/j.cub.2017.03.015

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Abstract

Migration allows animals to track the environmental conditions that maximize growth, survival, and reproduction [ 1–3 ]. Improved understanding of the mechanisms underlying migrations allows for improved management of species and ecosystems [ 1–4 ]. For centuries, the catadromous European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has provided one of Europe’s most important fisheries and has sparked considerable scientific inquiry, most recently owing to the dramatic collapse of juvenile recruitment [ 5 ]. Larval eels are transported by ocean currents associated with the Gulf Stream System from Sargasso Sea breeding grounds to coastal and freshwater habitats from North Africa to Scandinavia [ 6, 7 ]. After a decade or more, maturing adults migrate back to the Sargasso Sea, spawn, and die [ 8 ]. However, the migratory mechanisms that bring juvenile eels to Europe and return adults to the Sargasso Sea remain equivocal [ 9, 10 ]. Here, we used a “magnetic displacement” experiment [ 11, 12 ] to show that the orientation of juvenile eels varies in response to subtle differences in magnetic field intensity and inclination angle along their marine migration route. Simulations using an ocean circulation model revealed that even weakly swimming in the experimentally observed directions at the locations corresponding to the magnetic displacements would increase entrainment of juvenile eels into the Gulf Stream System. These findings provide new insight into the migration ecology and recruitment dynamics of eels and suggest that an adaptive magnetic map, tuned to large-scale features of ocean circulation, facilitates the vast oceanic migrations of the Anguilla genus

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Physics and Astronomy
Subjects: Q Science > QC Physics
Uncontrolled Keywords: magnetic orientation, animal migration, animal navigation, sensory ecology, ocean currents, Sargasso Sea, Anguilla anguilla
Additional Information: This is an open access article under the CC BY license
Publisher: Elsevier (Cell Press)
ISSN: 0960-9822
Funders: EPSRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 13 April 2017
Date of Acceptance: 3 March 2017
Last Modified: 05 May 2023 14:01
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/99882

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