{"id":220411,"date":"2025-08-19T08:06:34","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/first-insect-proven-to-use-milky-way-for-orientation-uses-its-superpower-to-push-big-balls-of-poop"},"modified":"2025-08-19T08:06:34","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:06:34","slug":"first-insect-proven-to-use-milky-way-for-orientation-uses-its-superpower-to-push-big-balls-of-poop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/first-insect-proven-to-use-milky-way-for-orientation-uses-its-superpower-to-push-big-balls-of-poop","title":{"rendered":"First Insect Proven To Use Milky Way For Orientation Uses Its Superpower To Push Big Balls Of Poop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/first-insect-proven-to-use-milky-way-for-orientation-uses-its-superpower-to-push-big-balls-of-poop.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The sky at night. It inspires awe. It inspires thoughts of an existential nature: Who are we? Why are we here? And, perhaps most importantly of all, in which direction should I roll this big ball of shit? That is, if you\u2019re a dung beetle.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfrican ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the [Sun], the [Moon], and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile,\u201d wrote the study authors. \u201cEven on clear moonless nights, many beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths. This led us to hypothesize that dung beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation, a feat that has, to our knowledge, never been demonstrated in an insect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The sky at night. It inspires awe. It inspires thoughts of an existential nature: Who are we? Why are we here? And, perhaps most importantly of all, in which direction should I roll this big ball of shit? That is, if you\u2019re a dung beetle. \u201cAfrican ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the [Sun], the [Moon], and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}