Seabirds racing home over the ocean can get jet-lagged

Flying across several time zones often causes jet lag, a feeling when the body insists it’s the middle of the night while the clock says it’s lunchtime. Now it turns out this nuisance is not exclusive to humans.

A new Science study on Manx shearwaters, seabirds that can fly hundreds of kilometers a day over the North Atlantic, shows they jet-lag themselves during their excursions. And because these birds navigate by the Sun, that jet lag leaves a measurable mark—it skews their compass.

Clockwork compass

Patrick Lewin is a behavioral and sensory ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study. “Manx shearwaters are medium-sized birds, about the same size as a pigeon,” Lewin said. “They are white underneath and black on top, but they have very long wings, and they are closely related to albatross.” Manx shearwaters nest in burrows on coastal islands around the North Atlantic. Most breed around the UK and Ireland, with about half of their population living in Wales.

From there, they head out to feed anywhere from a few dozen to more than 1,000 kilometers into the Atlantic. To get back, shearwaters are thought to work out where they are located using a map sense, possibly based on smells, and then use the Sun as a compass to set their direction.

The trouble with navigating by the Sun, though, is that it moves across the sky. “You can imagine an animal or a human that wants to travel south all day. At sunrise, when the Sun’s in the east, it needs to be traveling 90 degrees clockwise of the Sun, but by midday it needs to be traveling straight towards the Sun, and by sunset it needs to be traveling 90 degrees anticlockwise of the Sun,” Lewin said. Effective navigation by the Sun requires a clock that tells you what time of day it is. Birds, like nearly all animals, have such a clock built in. But the clock in Manx shearwaters is not perfect.