Meryl Horne

But anyway, let's look at this because like the general idea is that we know the moon creates tides in the oceans through like the pull of its gravity on water.

So what if it's doing something similar to us?

Well, first, my question actually was just, like, okay, sure, it's, like, pulling on us a little bit, but, like, how much?

Like, is it realistic that it's a big enough force to do anything?

So I asked an astronomer and a tidal expert, and they didn't, like, laugh it off completely, but they did the calculations on, like, how big the forces were, and they were tiny, like, minuscule.

Hmm.

One of them found that the force of the moon's gravity on our bodies is less than if you were just like walking by a tall building.

Like that building next to you would have a bigger force on our bodies than the moon because it's like a lot closer.

Yes.

Okay.

But still, just because the force is small doesn't mean that it's not doing anything to anybody.

I wondered if we knew of any animal that can sense this pull from the moon and thought of the animals that live in the tidal zone, because those animals are really affected by the moon's gravitational pull.

how big the tides are has this huge impact on their day-to-day life.

Yeah.

So to find out, I called Professor Kristin Tesmer-Reble at the University of Vienna in Austria, since she wrote a review about how animals are affected by the moon in different ways.

Right.

So I asked her, do we know of any organism that can directly sense the changes from the moon's gravity?

Oh, yes.

Who uses it?

I mean, you mean not, obviously, tidal changes.