Chapter 10

H E AV E N LY D U N G B E E T L E S

F or an idle half hour in the south of France, I was entranced by a

shiny black dung beetle as it tried—repeatedly and indefatigably—
to roll its ball up and over a small but steep ridge. Time after time it
lost control as it neared the top, and had to go back down and start all
over again, but eventually it succeeded and I felt like applauding.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped the dung beetle, believing that
it symbolized the sun god, Khepri, who rolled the ball of the sun across
the sky. Eric Warrant, who has worked with them over many years,
admires dung beetles almost as much: “They are so determined. That’s
what makes them so wonderful to work with. In many ways they’re
like little machines: they’ll roll balls forever, at any time.”
Rolling a ball in a straight line may not sound like a very impressive
feat. But bear in mind that the beetle has first got to sculpt the dung
into an accurate sphere (or it will not roll at all); it then has to go
backward steering the ball with its hindmost pair of legs, across ground
that may be very uneven.
Over the last twenty years, Warrant and his colleague, Marie Dacke,
have conducted a succession of fascinating experiments on dung beetle
navigation that have attracted a good deal of public attention, not least
in the form of an Ig Nobel Prize. These are awarded in Boston every
year for scientific research that “first makes you laugh, then makes you
think.” They are designed to draw attention to the sheer strangeness

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 of the universe around us—and the extraordinary, often eccentric,
dedication of the scientists who investigate it.
Although they are not meant to be taken too seriously, they are in
their own way very prestigious, and real Nobel Prize winners always
attend the ceremony. When Warrant and his team received their prize,
a small girl stood on the stage while each winner made a short speech
describing their work to the large audience. The girl’s job was to tell
the speaker to shut up when she thought they were getting boring.
Warrant was one of the few who managed to get through their speech
uninterrupted.
At the start of his scientific career, Warrant was studying how dung
beetles see in the dark. African dung beetles (also known as scarabs)
were introduced to Australia to deal with a problem caused by an earlier
animal import: the cow. The native dung beetles were only used to
tackling kangaroo droppings, and they had no idea what to do with
the accumulating piles of cow dung that were causing serious agricul-
tural damage. For the newly arrived African scarabs, Australia must
have been like heaven—vast accumulations of dung and no competi-
tion. They quickly and efficiently started burying all the stuff their
local cousins had been ignoring, and thereby restored the productivity
of Australian pastures, without apparently causing any problems for
other animals.
In 1996, Warrant attended a conference on dung beetle biology in
South Africa’s Kruger National Park. There he heard for the first time
about ball-rolling dung beetles. Unlike the ones he was familiar with,
these beetles scoop up the dung, deftly shape it into small spheres and
then roll them away as fast as they can. They then eat the dung or lay
eggs in the balls and bury them to provide food for their young when
they hatch.
Warrant recalls hearing the speaker say: “It’s amazing, they just
roll their balls in straight lines all the time and I don’t know how.” He
was sitting in the audience thinking excitedly, I know, I know: They
must be using the polarized light patterns in the night sky! He put his
hand up, asked a question, and the course of his career was changed.

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 Warrant and his colleagues soon showed that the ball-rolling
scarab had a DRA for detecting polarized light, exactly like the desert
ant. Then he and Marie Dacke began to explore how the beetles
actually used it for navigational purposes. Evidently the competition
for dung among these beetles is intense, and in order to make a quick
getaway, the beetle must roll its ball away from the dung pile in as
straight a line as possible. Otherwise it runs the risk of getting into
a scuffle with other beetles and being robbed of its precious cargo.
Before it sets off, the dung beetle climbs on top of its newly-formed
ball and performs a curious circular dance during which it carefully
inspects the sky above it.1
Many insects are nocturnal, but their compound eyes, though
extremely sensitive in low light conditions, offer far less visual acuity
than those of birds, or humans. So, while they can see much better
than us in the dark, their visual world is far blurrier than ours. It is
doubtful that the dung beetle can see many individual stars, except
perhaps the very brightest ones.
The most obvious possibility is that it uses the brightest light
source in the night sky: the moon. Since its forays are of short dura-
tion, the dung beetle has no need to make any allowance for the
moon’s changing azimuth, but the moon is nevertheless an inconstant
guide. Its phase changes constantly, so the amount of sunlight it
reflects varies greatly, and it rises and sets at a different time each
day, too. To complicate matters further, there are several nights every
(lunar) month when the “new” moon is so close in the sky to the sun
that it cannot be seen at all. And the intensity of even the full moon’s
light is far, far lower than that of the sun, though its spectrum is
much the same. It also includes ultraviolet light; in theory you could
get moon-burn, though it would take a very long time.
The dung beetle is well adapted to cope with lunar vagaries. First
of all, it relies not so much on the disk of the moon itself for guid-
ance, as on the polarization patterns (e-vectors) of its light, in the
same way that bees and desert ants use the polarized light of the sun
during the day.2

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 Completely cloudy nights are not common in the part of South
Africa where Warrant and Dacke conducted their experiments, but
what is a beetle to do when there is no moon?
The discovery that beetles can set a course using polarized moon-
light caused a big stir, and the paper describing it had the distinction
of being published in the leading scientific journal, Nature. Some years
later, however, Warrant and Dacke received a shock. They were in
camp on a brilliantly clear night at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
The velvet-black sky was filled with stars and they were waiting for
the moon to rise, so that they could start a new experiment.
Warrant described to me what happened next:

We had some dung out to try to catch the beetles and they were
flying in. Then they started making balls—the buggers!—and
rolling them away in perfectly straight lines, with no polarized
light . . . Both of us got very nervous, because suddenly it looked
like “Nature retractions, Nature retractions!”

To be forced to withdraw an article from any scientific journal, because

it has proven to be inaccurate, is a very public humiliation; but a retrac-
tion from a top one like Nature is about as bad as it can get. “A certain
amount of drinking was going on at this point,” according to Warrant,
but eventually a thought struck the two of them:

Just a minute, there’s a big stripe of light across the sky! The
Milky Way. Maybe they’re using that—could they be using that?
There’s nothing else round here they could be using.

Putting hats on beetles

To test their new idea, Warrant and Dacke started by attaching little
cardboard hats to the beetles, which made it impossible for them to
see the sky. They then had much more trouble steering a straight
course than when they had an unimpeded view. When transparent
plastic caps were substituted for the cardboard ones, they managed
perfectly well again, so it was plainly not the mere encumbrance of a

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 cap that was putting them off their stride. The next step was to test
the beetles in a circular arena, surrounded by a high barrier that pre-
vented them from seeing any landmarks. The researchers also removed
the overhead camera that recorded the beetles’ movements in case
this, too, because it was providing some kind of directional
information.
They placed each beetle with a ball of dung in the middle of the
arena and timed how long it took to reach the edge, which was marked
by a circular chute. The clatter of the beetle crashing down into the
chute told them when it had got there, and the length of time it had
taken indicated the straightness of its path. Under these conditions,
they were able to show that the beetles did indeed need to see the
starry sky to maintain a straight course, though they performed even
better when the moon was also present. However, under a cloudy sky
they were disoriented.
The researchers now took the beetles and their arena to a plane-
tarium. Under one condition, the animals could see the full starry sky,
including a long streak of light imitating the Milky Way, but without
the moon. Under another, they could see only the Milky Way. Their
ball-rolling performance was not much worse when they could see the
full starry sky, with the Milky Way, than when they could see the moon.
And when the Milky Way alone was presented, they did almost equally
well. However, when the long-suffering beetles had access to an array
of 4,000 dim stars without the Milky Way, their performance deterio-
rated considerably; and when just eighteen guide stars were available,
it got worse still.3
So, it appeared that the beetles were not making use of any individ-
ual guide stars. “This finding,” as Dacke reported, “represents the first
convincing demonstration of the use of the starry sky for orientation
in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for
orientation in the animal kingdom.”
Although the individual guide stars were not of much help to the
beetles, Warrant told me that it was still unclear whether the beetles
could actually see them. He thinks they probably can, and this is

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 something he hopes to be able to clarify by recording the responses
of individual light-sensitive cells in the eye of the beetle, just as he has
done with the sweat bee.
Dung beetles are not the only arthropods that can steer by the light
of the moon. The large yellow underwing moth can apparently do so,4
as can sandhoppers—small crustaceans that live a liminal, seaside exis-
tence. These animals, related to woodlice, are well named, because
their natural escape reaction is to propel themselves wildly into the air
by flexing their carapace. If you have ever built sandcastles, you may
well have encountered them, though their numbers are in decline in
many places.
It is not obvious why a creature as small and apparently primitive
as a sandhopper should care about the position of the moon. The
answer is that they are extremely fussy about moisture. They die if
they dry out, but they drown if they are submerged in salt water. So
they need constantly to move back and forth as the tides rise and fall,
and they must also be able to find their way back to a nice patch of
damp sand after their nocturnal foraging expeditions. And, of course,
it is absolutely vital that they move in the right direction. The sand-
hopper is the Goldilocks of the arthropod world.
As long ago as the 1950s, two Italian scientists, Leo Pardi (1915–
90) and Floriano Papi (1926–2016), made the extraordinary discov-
ery that sandhoppers used both the sun and moon as compasses to
help them move either toward or away from the sea, according to
need. This ability apparently depends on two separate clocks, one
calibrated to the daily movements of the sun and one to the slightly
different lunar cycle.5
The sandhopper’s sun compass is situated in its brain, while its lunar
compass is based in its antennae. And whatever mechanisms govern
these processes are plainly innate, because sandhoppers raised in cap-
tivity will always head off in the direction appropriate to their place
of origin. This means that a sandhopper descended from ancestors on
a south-facing coast will always tend to go south to find the sea, while
another with ancestors on a north-facing coast will tend to go north.

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