Clipping blog

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I Wonder if Male Dung Beetles Ask for Directions? Posted: 26 Jan 2013 01:27 PM PST Photo Credit: Marie Dacke Have you ever gotten turned around, without a map or handy GPS, and had to use the stars to navigate? Well, congratulations, you are the equal of the mighty dung beetle, which can not only use the Sun and Moon to get around smartly but also the Milky Way itself. They may be down in the dirt but it seems dung beetles also have their eyes on the stars. Scientists have shown how the insects will use the Milky Way to orientate themselves as they roll their balls of muck along the ground. Humans, birds and seals are all known to navigate by the stars. But this could be the first example of an insect doing so. The study by Marie Dacke is reported in the journal Current Biology. “The dung beetles are not necessarily rolling with the Milky Way or 90 degrees to it; they can go at any angle to this band of light in the sky. They use it as a reference,” the Lund University, Sweden, researcher told BBC News. As an aside, I saw Rolling with the Milky Way open for Pop Will Eat Itself in ’94. But, back to the dung beetles. What Dr. Dacke did was actually quite clever. She brought some dung beetles into a planetarium and put them into a container with blacked-out sides so they couldn’t see any other landmarks. Then, she put a star field overhead and found the beetles got around quite well, even if she dimmed the brightest stars to the point where all they could see was the light from the Milky Way itself. Kind of cool, huh? It turns out, the beetles actually use the whole star field (or so she believes) because they have difficulties getting around when the Milky Way is low on the horizon. So there’s your Saturday warm and fuzzy. Dung Beetles are better navigators than you.

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