What is going on with the East Alton Rotary Club? We will cover it here, along with all sorts of other interesting and off-kilter stuff that will inform, enlighten and amuse you.
Scientists have long known that birds and seals navigate by the stars. Now they’ve discovered that even the lowly dung beetle uses the Milky Way as a compass. “This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” biologist Eric Warrant of the University of Lund, in Sweden, tells NationalGeographic.com. Males among the inch-long beetles compete for mates by finding animal dung, sculpting a portion of it into a ball, and quickly rolling it away from the heap before another beetle can steal it. The dung ball then serves as food and as an incubator in which a female he has courted will lay a single egg. Researchers noticed that the beetles appeared adept at navigating away from a dung pile under clear skies, but on overcast nights they rolled in circles. So researchers took them to a planetarium. There, when the streak of the Milky Way was visible, the beetles’ path was direct and unerring. Warrant believes further research could establish stellar navigation as a widespread skill among insects. “Migrating moths might also be able to do it,” he says.
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