Fri February 1, 2013 Dung Beetles Use Cosmic GPS to Find Their
Way Originally published on Fri February 1, 2013 12:03 pm IRA
FLATOW, HOST: Now for a surprising find from the insect world.
The dung beetle, that insect known for sculpting little balls of
animal feces that they roll around and later feast on. Well, it
turns out that these beetles have a built-in cosmic GPS that
helps them navigate around. Dung beetles use light - listen to
this - use light from the Milky Way to orient themselves at
night. It's all in a paper published earlier this month in the
journal Current Biology. My next guest is here to tell us more
about how dung beetles see the starry - how do they see the
starry night, a starry sky? Eric Warrant is a co-author of the
dung beetle study in Current Biology, professor of functional
zoology at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. Welcome to the
program. ERIC WARRANT: Thank you very much. It's nice to be
here. FLATOW: So dung beetles use the starry night, they use the
Milky Way to navigate around