Africa's Incredible Six-Legged Astronomers

From the National Geographic archives, this 2013 article is a beautiful explainer of the intersection between the miniature and the meta worlds we inhabit. It joyfully describes a Swedish study, originally published in the journal Current Biology, which showed that dung beetles in South Africa actually use the Milky Way to orient themselves. The unusual hypothesis (prompted by scientists wondering how the nocturnal bugs found their way on moonless nights) was tested out in the Johannesburg planetarium, and even featured tiny little galaxy-blocking helmets placed on the test subjects, to see what happened when they were physically unable to see the stars (they waddled around, directionless, like dung beetles after one too many at the local Elephant Poo Pub).

From the outside, the study seems... a little odd. It was even nominated for an IgNobel Award that year. But there is something truly marvelous about the smallest creatures being able to perceive galactic patterns so many thousands of light years away: the very first astronomers, perhaps. A further study by the authors, published the following year, showed that dung beetles also used skylight polarisation patterns as orientation clues, what they described as a "celestial compass".

Dung beetles, strange as they are, play an important role in African wildlife ecosystems, particularly with recycling/moving the dung of the continent's remaining large mammals. The original study suggested that, if global light pollution continued along its current trajectory, the loss of a visible Milky Way might have impacts far beyond what we might have thought.