Dung beetles use a visual snapshot of the Milky Way to maintain a straight line when rolling dung away from crowded feeding patches.
Planetarium Experiments
In 2013, researchers placed dung beetles inside a planetarium to test their nocturnal orientation under controlled skies. The Study published in Current Biology demonstrated that the insects successfully oriented themselves when the Milky Way was visible, including conditions where the broad band appeared without the full field of individual stars.
Before rolling their food away, the beetles climb on top of the dung ball and perform a pirouette. To monitor neural activity and pathways, Dacke’s team placed microscopic electrodes directly into individual neurons inside the brains of the dung beetles.
Beetles Move in Straight Paths to Manage Competition
There can be thousands of beetles arriving on one dung patch during periods of high competition,
said Professor Marie Dacke, a sensory biologist at Lund University in Sweden.
She led the EU-funded UltimateCOMPASS initiative for six years until May 2025, aiming to understand how biological compasses work in any environment at any time. Scientists had previously established that various species rely on distinct navigational markers, including the sun, moon, constellations, and the Milky Way.
By moving perfectly straight, they can maximise the distance between themselves, other beetles and the dung pat with every step they take,
according to research findings. When natural celestial information was obscured, beetles relied more on bright ground-level beacons.
Dacke noted that beetles leaned more heavily on wind direction as the sun climbed higher in the sky, indicating that they dynamically reweight the significance of each navigational factor as environmental conditions shift. The dung beetles respond from moment to moment to how the environment is changing,
said Dacke.
Robot Navigation
Professor Barbara Webb runs the Insect Robotics Group at the University of Edinburgh. Her team used findings about the dung beetle brain to design a tiny neural circuit for a robot. Professor Barbara Webb noted regarding UltimateCOMPASS that The insects are solving navigational problems with tiny neural networks,
adding that It shows that these things can be done in a super-efficient way with very low energy consumption.
Insects can do some things that robots are not very good at,
Webb said. According to her, insights gathered from insects could translate into bio-inspired orientation networks serving as fail-safes when GPS signals drop, particularly for sectors like farming, while she remarked, What I’d like to see is small, simple, efficient robots for different contexts.
Light Pollution Disruptions
Artificial light interferes with the insects’ ability to use natural sky signals. A 2021 study examined how light pollution forces dung beetles to rely instead on bright ground-level beacons. Because hiding the moon from the beetle’s view does not equal the complete elimination of all lunar data, the design of any experimental intervention must properly align with the underlying mechanism being tested.