Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hey, i need some info on the question: Do animals align themselves with earths magnetic field. I am using it as a science fair project, and i also need to develop a hypothesis. Thanks

This is a great question. You might want to start with researching animals migration patterns. Perhaps some searches for "animal migration and magnetic field" would give some good ideas.

I'm unsure how you might be able to test a hypothesis though.

Audrey

So, if i were to make a hypothesis would it say like, if i did this than this would happen?

mike3241 wrote:So, if i were to make a hypothesis would it say like, if i did this than this would happen?

mike3241,

That is basically the format of a hypothesis. However, given your original statement, I have the same concern if it is testable. Check out the ScienceBuddies project guide @:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndex.shtml

You need to identify your variables:

Dependant - those, you think will be affected by changing some other variable.
Independent - those conditions you will change and measure how much they affected your dependant variable.
Control - conditions, like environment, that can affect/slew your results that must be minimized and/or accounted for in the experiment design.

Back to your original statement, which animals are you talking about? Might be difficult to test the entire animal kingdom. Do you intend to change the magnetic field strength felt by a test subject? If so, how? What behavior do you expect your test subject to exibit, with and without test conditions? What exactly so you mean by "align"?

If you can answer these and I'm sure a few more questions, you'll be well on your way to designing a really neat experiment.

Okay this is specifically for Cows. And the question is do they tend to face magnetic north.

So what i am saying is that i would find herds of cows via google earth. And make note if they are facing magnetic north or not. so i am not like testing a real cow.

Here is the link to the project idea. https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p058.shtml

My personal experience with cows is that weather, particularly wind speed, wind direction, rain/snow/sleet and the local geography, hills, valleys, trees, shade, sun, windbreaks, fences might have more to do with what direction they tend to face. I have a hard time understanding how you can rule out these other factors with the data you get from google earth.

Well, background research shows that there position is effected by like by the sun, or wind. But they gathered the info when these were not present

mike3241 wrote:Well, background research shows that there position is effected by like by the sun, or wind. But they gathered the info when these were not present

mike3214,

A clarifying point. As I read the paper by Dr. Begall, et al., environmental conditions (wind, sun, etc...) were still present, they attempted to account for them, however. It would be very difficult (if not impossible) to eliminate environment factors in non-laboratory settings, such as pasture. The proceedures described included field experiments where the environment can be measured. The satellite imagery (via Google Earth) doesn't allow direct measurement of the conditions to determine if they are present or not.

In this situation, the environment conditions are control variables. These are accounted for through a large sample size (in the paper, I believe it was several thousand individual animals) dispersed over many different location on the globe at many different times of day. By doing this, one would be able to make an assumption that the environmental conditions are random enough so as to not be a common factor in a North-South orientation of an observed animals. Any assumptions of this sort should be included and documented in the research paper.

If you do this experiment, ensure you have the time to analyze a large sample size. Additionally, I would expect that some individual animals in the images would exibit an orientation other than N-S. You must include these in your analysis as well to determine a percentage of observed animals aligned with Mag N and those that are otherwise. For example, if you made observations of 1000 animals and 800 exibit a N-S orientation and 200 were not, then, 80% exibited the expected behavior, alowing some logical conclusions to be drawn with respect to magnetoreception.

Okay, thanks for your help!