PARTICIPATING RESEACHERSKEY CollaboratorsMarie Dacke (Lund University, Sweden)
Emily Baird (Stockhom University, Sweden) Marcus J. Byrne (Wits University, South Africa) James Foster (University of Konstanz, Germany) APPLIED Techniques   klick on logos for more information
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After finding a dung pat, South African ball-rolling dung beetles break off a piece of dung, shape it into a ball, and roll it away along a straight path. Once a beetle has found a suitable place, it digs itself, together with the ball, into the soil and consumes the ball underground.
To maintain their rolling direction, dung beetles rely on the sun, the polarization pattern, the spectral and intensity contrast of the sky for orientation. At night, dung beetles rely on the moon, the lunar polarization pattern, and the stars for orientation. How all these cues are weighted and combined in the dung beetle compass is still little understood. At high sun/moon elevations, the directional information derived from the sky is less reliable. To keep their headings with the highest precision, dung beetles employ a wind compass during rolling at midday. How skylight cues and wind cues are integrated in the beetle brain to establish a multimodal compass remains unknown. Prior to rolling, dung beetles climb on top fo their ball and rotate around their vertical body axis. This behavior, know as the dung beetle dance, allows the beetles to take a snapshot of the spatial relationship of the available skylight cues that are susequently used for orientation. How these cues are combined during the dance and why dung beetles need to rotated around their body to read the skylight cues is not known. In collaboration with Marie Dacke's lab (Lund, Sweden), we aim to shed light on the orientation system and the brain network in dung beetles. To achieve this, we are combining behavioral experiments with neuroanatomical and electrophysiological approaches. |
FURTHER READINGSDacke M, Baird EJ, el Jundi B, Warrant EJ, Byrne MJ (2021) How dung beetles steer straight. Ann Rev Entomol 66:12.1-12.14.
el Jundi B, Baird E, Byrne M, Dacke M (2019) The brain behind straight-line orientation in dung beetles. J Exp Biol 222: jeb192450.
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