SUN HAVEN STEPHEN PATCH
SUN HAVEN STEPHEN FULL

In a paper published July 2021, Foster's team described how urban lights wipe out the Milky Way, reduce the polarization of moonlight by 60% to 70%, and 'create anthropogenic celestial cues.' The last item is worst of all. 'Light pollution may be forcing beetles to abandon the Milky Way as their compass,' worries Foster.Ībove: Researcher Claudia Tocco observes the behavior of a dung beetle surrounded by urban lights. Next they added city lights to their experiment-and the results were not good. This threshold puts features such as the galactic center in Sagittarius and the Great Rift in Cygnus theoretically within range of beetle senses. In 2017 they found that dung beetles were able to distinguish between north and south arms of the Milky Way, sensing intensity contrasts as low as 13%. It uses LED lights to mimic the Milky Way as beetles see it through their compound eyes. James Foster is a leader in the field, publishing new results every few years.įoster and colleagues have built a rudimentary planetarium just for dung beetles. Their discovery prompted a veritable explosion in dung beetle research. To find the answer, they took some beetles to the planetarium at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and projected the Milky Way onto the domed ceiling. These are four models used in the experiments of James Foster.īut what happens when there's no sun or Moon? In the early 2000s, this question troubled two pioneers of dung beetle research, Eric Warrant and Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden. Studies show that dung beetles walk straight as accurately at night as during the day, even when the Moon is a faint crescent.Ībove: Dung beetle vision blurs the Milky Way, but no one is certain how much. Dung beetles are the only known creatures who can see the polarization of moonlight, which is 100 million times weaker than daylight polarization.

SUN HAVEN STEPHEN PATCH

A single patch of blue sky is sufficient. Dung beetles can see polarization patterns in the daytime sky, and use these patterns to hold course.

Dung beetles have therefore evolved the ability to navigate to safety in quick straight lines.ĭuring the day they steer by the sun. Wandering around in circles ( like lost humans do) boosts the odds of a fight even more.

SUN HAVEN STEPHEN FULL

If two beetles leaving the pile bump into one other, they can get into a brutal wrestling match often ending with overhead judo-style full body throws. Far from the pile, the ball will be buried and eaten, and sometimes used as bedding for dung beetle eggs. Each beetle sculpts a dung ball, which they roll away in a straight line. Whenever a pile of brown material is dumped in the forest, dung beetles converge to clean up the mess. 'They are excellent little astronomers.'Ī quick review of dung beetles: They are nature's sanitation crew. 'Currently, dung beetles are the only animals we know of that use the Milky Way for reliable orientation,' says James Foster of the University of Konstanz in Germany. Although the compound eyes of beetles cannot resolve individual stars, this species can see the Milky Way as a stripe across the sky and perhaps even sense features within it such as the galactic center and lanes of stardust.Ībove: A nocturnal dung beetle at work.

Nocturnal dung beetles ( Scarabaeus satyrus) can navigate using the Milky Way. In 2009, entomologists made an astonishing discovery. After you read this article, a different picture may come to mind: The Milky Way. When you hear the words 'dung beetle' you probably think of poop. Solar flare alerts: SMS TextĭUNG BEETLES NAVIGATE USING THE MILKY WAY: If there is such an eruption (NOAA estimates a 5% chance) it will be geoeffective because the sunspot is almost directly facing Earth.

Could it be the calm before the storm? The sunspot has developed a delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class solar flares. Neutron counts from the University of Oulu's Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory show that cosmic rays reaching Earth are slowly declining-a result of the yin-yang relationship between the solar cycle and cosmic rays.Ī DANGEROUS SUNSPOT: Sunspot AR3089 has been quiet for days. Credit: SDO/HMIĬosmic Rays Solar Cycle 25 is beginning, and this is reflected in the number of cosmic rays entering Earth's atmosphere. Sunspot AR3089 has a delta-class magnetic field that poses a threat for X-class solar flares.

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