What Animals See in the Stars, and What They Stand to Lose
Related: Light pollution forces a change in dung beetle orientation behavior (Current Biology)
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Source: New York Times
What Animals See in the Stars, and What They Stand to Lose
Humans aren’t the only species that navigate by starlight. Animals from birds to dung beetles may do it, too — and might become disoriented as our city lights drown out the heavens.
By Joshua Sokol
July 29, 2021, 11:15 a.m. ET
One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.
The researchers had been watching nocturnal dung beetles, miniature Sisyphuses of the savanna, as they tumbled giant balls of dung. The beetles seemed to be able to roll remarkably straight, even though they had no clear landmarks to reference.
“We thought maybe they were using our cameras, maybe someone had lit a fire somewhere,” Dr. Dacke said. “We were really confused.” Then they realized the beetles were guided by the 100,000 light-years-long streak of the Milky Way.
We humans are famous for this sort of thing. The stars beckoned our species to cross seas and kindled the sciences that later let us putter up toward them in rockets. From culture to culture, the Milky Way served as backdrop and inspiration for stories about rivers, trees, gods, serpents and, of course, exploration.
But we weren’t the only ones looking.
Researchers like Dr. Dacke suspect that a wide swath of the animal world might sometimes navigate by starlight — and might be lost as our city lights drown out ever more of it. Her team’s newest study, published Thursday, found that dung beetles became confused under light-swamped skies. The result adds to a small and scattered body of research, conducted over decades, on what the night sky might mean to the other earthlings who can sense it.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/animals-starlight-navigation-dacke.html
