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01 Sep 08
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migratory birds use their visual system to perceive the reference compass direction of the geomagnetic field and that migratory birds “see” the reference compass direction provided by the geomagnetic field.
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The magnetite-mediated mechanism seems to act as part of a magnetic map- or signpost sense, which could provide the animal with information about its geographic position, whereas the vision-mediated magnetic sense seems to be a pure compass sense that is based on radical-pair processes in the birds' eye(s)
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(cryptochromes)
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Cluster N processes some kind of night-time visual information processing which is a specialization of night-migratory birds [for detailed arguments], [see 13, 14]. Combined with these findings, the present tracing data for the first time suggest a putative magnetosensory compass pathway from the sensory organ (the eye) to its main integrative brain center (Cluster N) in night-migratory birds. This putative compass-magnetosensory pathway involves restricted subregions at all levels of the thalamofugal visual pathway: neuronal subpopulations in the retina, ventral parts of the thalamic Gld (lateral and ventral DLL, SpRt, LdOPT) and lateral parts of the visual wulst (Cluster N). Due to the fact that a known visual pathway connects the only brain structures that have been shown to be active during magnetic orientation, our findings strongly support the hypothesis that migratory birds perceive the magnetic field as a visual pattern and that they are thus likely to “see” the magnetic field.
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