Beetles Navigate By Stars

Some insects, like dung beetles, named for their diet o' dung, scientists have discovered, go out foraging for food at night and navigate using the night sky. The beetles look up, note their position, then trundle along to safety.

When scientists blocked the beetles' ability to see the sky, using tiny cardboard hats, the chapeaued bugs just, "rolled around and around and around in circles," according to researcher Eric Warrant.

In another experiment, the researchers placed the beetles in a room with an artificial sky projection and were able to redirect their movements by changing the position of the moon and stars.

The scientists hope their research can help the advancement of self-driving cars.

It's not the putting them on, it's the folding the cardboard into teeny little triangles.

I think once you get the instructions down it goes faster, but you probably need tiny fingers to apply.

Heeey, if Trump is ousted...

That'd be too obvious. Also, might be reflective of the moon and throw off the other beetles, see.

frimble3 said:

Oscar Wilde: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars."
Even a dung beetle can dream.

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Awww.

Introversion said:

Embedding a few dung beetles into the dash has to be cheaper than all that hardware & software they use now, too.

I'm guessing the hardest part will be teaching the beetles not to too closely follow neighborhood manure trucks?

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I'm sorry, your neighbourhood has... manure trucks? I... do they deposit or remove??

This is entirely, 100%....









TRUE. Yes, including the cardboard hats.

It's actually even more ridiculous-sounding than I have here. I cut stuff out!

So, as explained in this NPR story, the beetles find some poo, roll it into a ball, then stand on the ball and dance up there, like, log rolling like, while checking out the sky, to orient themselves, before rolling their snack to safety. If they don't, they may be mugged for their poo by lazy beetles of a criminal element. I am not kidding.

Entirely true.

"They have to get away from the pile of dung as fast as they can and as efficiently as they can because the dung pile is a very, very competitive place with lots and lots of beetles all competing for the same dung," zoologist Eric Warrant from Lund told All Things Considered three years ago.

"And there's very many lazy beetles that are just waiting around to steal the balls of other industrious beetles and often there are big fights in the dung piles," he said.

After conducting an experiment in which some beetles wore cardboard hats that blocked their views of the stars, the researchers determined that "dung beetles can roll their balls of dung in straight lines by using the Milky Way as a compass queue," Warrant said. He added that the tiny waste harvester wearing the cardboard hats just "rolled around and around and around in circles. They couldn't keep a straight path."

The new findings about dung beetles' ability to take snapshots of the night sky could be significant for humans as well, el Jundi says in the statement. According to him, it could help in the "development of navigation systems in driverless vehicles."

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Introversion said:

Yours doesn't? Wow, what kind of 3rd-world hell-hole do you live in, cornflake??

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I still don't even know if they're dropping off or picking up!!!