If you are a fox, and it’s winter, most of your food is hiding somewhere under the snow.  So how might you go about catching a meal?  Foxes hunt mice, and in winter they can often be seen “mousing,” quietly stalking their prey in open snowfields. They move slowly and listen carefully with their large ears until – bam! – they take a long flying leap and dive nose-first into the snow to grab a mouse they can’t even see.

Some remarkable research now suggests that in addition to a keen sense of hearing, the fox may also have a magnetic sense, which it uses to detect the mouse and plot it’s trajectory. Check out this video and read Robert Krulwich’s recent NPR blog post to learn more about this fascinating biological strategy.