Dung beetles guided by Milky Way

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/23/16668013-dung-beetles-guided-by-milky-way?lite

Jan. 24, 2013
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

When dung beetles roll their tiny balls of poop across the sands of South Africa on a moonless night, they look to the glow of our Milky Way galaxy as a navigational aid, researchers report.

"Even on clear, moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths," Marie Dacke, a biologist at Sweden's Lund University, said in a news release. "This led us to suspect that the beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation — a feat that had, to our knowledge, never before been demonstrated in an insect."

That's an amazing claim. But what's just as amazing are the lengths to which the researchers went to make their case.

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The bottom line was clear: Those bugs could keep track of how the fuzzy streak of the Milky Way was oriented in the sky, to make sure they rolled their balls of dung in a suitably straight line.

Why is that so important? Without the proper orientation, the beetles might circle back to the dung pile, where they'd have to face all the other beetles trying to steal away their tiny balls of poop. That would put the bugs' intended meal at risk. "The dung beetles don't care which direction they're going in; they just need to get away from the bun fight at the poo pile," Marcus Byrne of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand explained in a news release.