What do bees, birds, dolphins, and nematodes have in common?

Their behavior is influenced by magnetic fields, a force that humans are completely insensitive to.

Even the tiny soil nematode C. elegans, despite its humble neuroanatomy of only 302 neurons, can respond to magnets. This observation is a key element of a 2015 publication published in eLife called “Magnetosensitive neurons mediate geomagnetic orientation in Caenorhabditis elegans”.

When you put a little cube of soil into a magnetic field, C. elegans move in ways that suggest they care more about magnetic polarity than gravity.

And one of my favorite control studies in science: order worms from all around the world, where magnetic fields are different in both direction and intensity, and their movement can be predicted based on their native magnetic field.

I really want to know, from an evolutionary perspective, why magnetic fields are just not important enough for humans to warrant keeping those sensory structures functional. Do we just rely on our very well developed frontal lobes and fancy memory features? Is it because we don’t migrate often enough? Or, was magnetosensation just a fluke of evolutionary development that popped up in these other animals? SOMEONE TELL ME