Paper Hats for Dung Beetles
by Laura Chalus, CEO, Tulsa Garden Center at Woodward Park
With a fresh pile of dung in place, researchers at a field site on the edge of the Kalahari sat back to wait for moonrise. This was the time of day when dung beetles began to emerge and search for their unseemly meals. The beetles would scurry around as fast as possible to reach their prize, roll it into a ball, and get away before rival beetles would try to rob them. But something happened that the researchers had not expected.
Testing a hypothesis that dung beetles were using the light of the moon to navigate expeditiously in a straight line back to their little beetle houses, the researchers were caught off guard as the energetic scarabs began to flock to the poo pile before the moon had even come out.
Upon realizing that these tricky bugs might have just blown their whole theory out of the water, the researchers looked up. What they saw in that immensely black sky, washed with an infinite number of twinkling stars, was the unmistakable light of the milky way. Could it be? Were the beetles really using the milky way to effectively navigate back to their beetle abodes?
Enter the paper hats. Researches outfitted the beetles with tiny paper hats to see if that changed how the beetles hot footed it back home along such a linear path. And lo and behold, it did. The dung beetles could no longer successfully navigate in a straight line but instead staggered around like they’d all had one too many. I’d also suspect there was a lot of poo pirates that evening as the beetles ran around helter-skelter without the use of their built-in GPS.
Science can be fascinating, while also truly bizarro, but the key to new discoveries seems to lie in our ability to adapt and overcome. Sometimes we have to resign ourselves, albeit begrudgingly, to making adjustments and modifications along the way, lest we find ourselves stumbling into a giant pile of….well, you know.