Hızlı uçuşlar deniz kuşlarında bir tür jet lag’e yol açıyor

Jet lag does not trouble long-haul travellers alone. A study in Science reports that Manx shearwaters, seabirds tracked from breeding colonies in the United Kingdom, can fly east or west quickly enough for their internal clocks to drift out of step with local time. Because the sun shifts across the sky during the day, a bird using it as a compass needs an accurate sense of the hour; otherwise it misjudges where the sun should be. Over two decades, a team including Oxford biologist Tim Guilford fitted 1,045 breeding birds with tiny GPS trackers and analysed 1,837 uninterrupted flights back to their colonies. As the team had calculated, the birds strayed by up to 15 degrees from their intended heading. Surprisingly, these small errors persisted even within sight of presumably familiar coastlines, which suggests the shearwaters combine their sun compass with coastal cues even when these two signals conflict. The detours added only a few kilometres to each trip.