This paper presents a study of the body orientation of domestic cattle on free pastures in several European states, based on the Google satellite photographs. In sum, 232 herds with 3,412 individuals were evaluated. Two independent groups participated in our study and came to the same conclusion that in contradiction to the recent findings of other researchers, no alignment of the animals and of their herds along geomagnetic field lines could be found. Several possible reasons for this discrepancy should be taken into consideration: poor quality of Google satellite photographs, difficulties in determining the body axis, selection of herds or animals within herds, lack of blinding in the evaluation, possible subconscious bias, and, most importantly, high sensitivity of the calculated main directions of the Rayleigh vectors to some kind of bias or to some overlooked or ignored confounder. This factor could easily have led to an unsubstantiated positive conclusion about the existence of magnetoreception.
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This work has been supported by National Institute of Public Health and the Czech Grant Agency (project no. 102/09/0314). We also would like to thank Radek Theier, Filip Truhlar, Jan Prochazka, Filip Kroupa, and Michael Hapala for their assistance in data acquisition.
Author information Authors and AffiliationsDepartment of Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, 305 06, Plzen, Czech Republic
J. Hert
Department of Electromagnetic Field, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, 166 27, Prague, Czech Republic
L. Jelinek
National Reference Laboratory for Electromagnetic Field, National Institute of Public Health, 100 42, Prague, Czech Republic
L. Pekarek
Department of System Analysis, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
A. Pavlicek
Correspondence to L. Jelinek.
Electronic supplementary materialBelow is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
About this article Cite this articleHert, J., Jelinek, L., Pekarek, L. et al. No alignment of cattle along geomagnetic field lines found. J Comp Physiol A 197, 677–682 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-011-0628-7
Received: 16 November 2010
Revised: 25 January 2011
Accepted: 25 January 2011
Published: 12 February 2011
Issue Date: June 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-011-0628-7
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