Some turtles “dance” when they anticipate food, which gives us clues as to how they navigate from A to B
By Chris Simms
12 February 2025
Some turtles flap about when a magnetic field suggests they are about to be fed
Goforth et al., Nature (2025)
Baby loggerhead turtles “dance” when they are expecting food, a behaviour that researchers have used to investigate their navigation abilities. By learning to associate a magnetic field with a food, this cute display has helped indicate that the sea turtles have two distinct geomagnetic senses to help them navigate during their epic ocean journeys.
“The turtle dance is a strange pattern of behaviour that emerges quickly in young captive sea turtles when they figure out that food comes from above,” says Ken Lohmann at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They would get very excited and raise their heads up out of the water and come swimming over, and often if the food wasn’t dropped in immediately, they would begin to flap their flippers and spin around.”
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Lohmann and his colleagues realised that there might be a way to use this behaviour to reveal how turtle navigation works. They put juvenile loggerhead sea turtles in tanks surrounded by coil systems that created magnetic fields in the water, replicating those in their natural habitats.
The juveniles spent an equal amount of time in two magnetic fields, but were only fed in one of them. Soon, when they were in a magnetic field they associated with food, the turtles started to dance in anticipation, a learned behaviour reminiscent of Ivan Pavlov‘s famous dog experiment. “We demonstrated that the turtles can learn to recognise magnetic fields,” says team member Kayla Goforth at Texas A&M University.