By the Light of the Moon, the Poles of the Earth

Back in January, science news was abuzz with reports that the lowly dung-beetle—shellacked trundler of balled-up excreta, stuck with one of nature’s least glamorous jobs—used a majestic method to find its way around: the Milky Way. The critters had already been shown to exploit the polarized light of the moon to orient and move their smelly cargo in straight lines. But researchers knew there was a back-up mechanism, since on nights when the moon rose late, the insects’ sense of direction was still pretty good. A team from Lund University in Sweden tested their subjects under the night sky of the Kalahari Desert and in the controlled environment of a planetarium. In both settings, beetles with a view of the burning band of the galaxy moved competently, while those which were offered only the brightest stars or none at all were lost. “It’s corny, but it’s a highway in the sky, a great big pathway: the Milky Way,” one of the researchers told The New Yorker.

The critters had already been shown to exploit the polarized light of the moon to orient and move their smelly cargo in straight lines.

We may pride ourselves on our ingenious means of transportation, but animals themselves are capable of remarkable feats of swimming, scuttling, and flying, often with pinpoint accuracy. Monarch butterflies  to travel the thousands of miles between the northern United States and Mexico; seals appear to guide themselves through the seas by a . While animals’ motives for moving around are simple—to breed and feed—the mechanisms by which they do it are not. Animals possess an exceptional array of compasses, clocks, distance-sensing techniques, and internal maps. The examples below are guided by, by James and Carol Gould.