Lund University professor Marie Dacke discusses her famous research with dung beetles, and also how she became a biologist, her joy at working with colleagues, and what happened when she and her team won an Ig Nobel Prize — and what happened as a consequence of winning that prize. Dacke was interviewed in the The Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – Caesar’s Neuroyagers podcast, in the episode called “Guided by the Stars: The Fascinating World of Dung Beetles and Navigation with Marie Dacke“.
The Ig Nobel discussion begins at about the 8:10 point of that episode.
The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for biology and astronomy (the first and only time a prize has been awarded in those joined categories) was awarded to Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke Scholtz, and Eric J. Warrant, for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way.
They documented that research, in the study “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Current Biology, vol. 23, no. 4, 2013, pp. 298-300.