How Dung Beetles Steer Straight.

Distant and predictable features in the environment make ideal compass cues to allow movement along a straight path. Ball-rolling dung beetles use a wide range of different signals in the day or night sky to steer themselves along a fixed bearing. These include the sun, the Milky Way, and the polarization pattern generated by the moon. Almost two decades of research into these remarkable creatures has shown that the dung beetle's compass is flexible and readily adapts to the cues available in its current surroundings. In the morning and afternoon, dung beetles use the sun to orient, but at midday, they prefer to use the wind, and at night or in a forest, they rely primarily on polarized skylight to maintain straight paths. We are just starting to understand the neuronal substrate underlying the dung beetle's compass and the mystery of why these beetles start each journey with a dance. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Entomology, Volume 66 is January 11, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Annual Review of Entomology

• Publication date

  2020-08-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1146/annurev-ento-042020-102149PMID 32822556
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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