I think we’re all familiar with the image of the lowly dung beetle, rolling its ball of dung along. Apparently, competition in the wild for the dung is fierce, so the male dung beetles roll it away from the fresh pile as quickly as they can, in a straight line, to keep others from taking it. The male beetle and his mate then bury the dung ball, which will become food for their babies. Fascinating stuff, really!

Scientists already knew that dung beetles used polarized light around the sun during the day to roll a straight line, but the mystery was how they did it at night.

Now they know! Through careful observation and experimentation, they discovered the dung beetles use the bright line marked by our Milky Way galaxy to stay true.

From nationalgeographic.com:

Talk about star power—a new study shows that dung beetles navigate via the Milky Way, the first known species to do so in the animal kingdom.

The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.

“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.

Read the entire article here.