Once a beetle has found some dung and rolled part of it into a ball, he’s got to get it out of there, rolling it in a straight line away from the dung pile, or the other beetles will come and poach it. How they manage this, even on moonless nights when obvious cues and landmarks are absent or invisible, has been a mystery.
Last January a team of Swedish and South African researchers reported that African dung beetles, Scarabaeus satyrus, can use the Milky Way as their guide. In a series of experiments in a game preserve and a planetarium, a team led by Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden found that when the beetles were fitted with little caps that prevented them from seeing the sky or the stars were clouded out, the beetles wandered aimlessly, putting their little dung treasures at risk. But a starlit sky, or just a dim band representing the disk of our humble home galaxy, is a enough to keep them on track. “Although this is the first description of an insect using the Milky Way for their orientation, this ability might turn out to be widespread in the animal kingdom,” the scientists wrote in Current Biology.
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