Can animals sense radio waves ?

I'm very skeptical.

DARPA funds projects that are high risk, but with high potential. The risk is that no one has ever observed RF activity from a live animal and the concept might prove unobservable. But if Deheyn and his collaborators can detect biologically active RF, the rewards for biology would be huge. In the future, it’s possible humans could build a cell phone antenna using just molecular units or a soft, biological material such as tissue, researchers said.

Telepathy sounds like a really, seriously, oh god no why "please don't do this !!!!" idea to me, but anyway...

“It’s a difficult problem from both modelling and measurement perspectives, but the biggest challenge will be determining if the electromagnetic effects that we find are purposeful, as opposed to just a side effect of something else,” Sievenpiper said. But, he added, “if we find that animals, cells, or even smaller structures within cells can interact through electromagnetic waves, that would open up a whole new field of research.”

There are a number of unexplained “cold cases” in biology where organisms show behaviors, morphological changes or coordinations of cellular features that seem inexplicable if one considers only using known forms of communication – sight, sound, touch, smell, and ultimately electrical transduction. For example, squids are able to change the texture of their skin to match their environment and thus camouflage their body. But squids are still able to do this even if they have been blinded. So how do they do this? If they’re not using sight, how do they sense the 3-D shape of their surroundings?

I dunno. Smell ? Temperature ? Water currents ?

Members of Deheyn’s lab studying bioluminescence in brittle stars have similarly discovered that a brittle star’s photocytes (the cells that make them produce light) have cilia – hair-like structures all along their cell membrane. “Cilia are good for helping a cell to swim and for helping a cell to react to the dynamism of the surrounding environment,” Deheyn said. “It doesn’t make sense for a cell that is embedded in deep tissue to be ciliated but the photocytes in the brittle star have cilia. Why?”

Deheyn thinks it’s possible that microtubules – molecular units that control cilia to make them extend, shrink, or bend – form an electromagnetic dipole that is emitting or receiving electromagnetic signals. Essentially, the cells inside brittle stars might be covered in tiny radio antennae.

I've no idea why brittle stars have internal cillia (aren't they also used for moving internal fluids ?) but I'm pretty sure that "because they need RF communications" must be pretty near the bottom of the list of possibilities.


https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/can-organisms-sense-radio-frequency