The Shearwater Story With a Missing Wingbeat

Transcript

Researchers were testing how shearwaters find home, but the key comparison has a gap: I can’t verify the result in the 2018 review. The available source does not say what happened to birds whose smell nerves were cut, compared with birds whose ophthalmic trigeminal branches were cut while their smell nerves stayed intact. So I won’t guess which birds found home. Until that passage is checked, there’s no fair verdict about which sense mattered. A neat navigation story can turn on one missing detail, and animal senses may still have surprises waiting for us.