When people first encounter something surprising, it can seem laughable and thought-provoking. Later, if enough people come to decide the discovery is important, people then treat it with reverence and awe. The discovery has become too important, apparently, to describe with amusement. The public reaction has changed—but it’s the same discovery! Here is , perhaps, […]
Tag: dung beetle
Further adventures in dung-beetle-navigation research
Rachel Feltman chronicles, in the Washington Post, some further adventures of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning dung beetle navigation researchers: The humble dung beetle has a fantastic way of navigating the world If you’re a dung beetle, you spend a good portion of your life dancing around on top of a ball made of poop – a ball […]
Marcus Byrne tells of the dung beetles and the Milky Way
Marcus Byrne tells about the dung-beetles-and-the-Milky-Way research that led to an Ig Nobel Prize for him and his colleagues, in this University of the Witwatersrand video: That Ig Nobel Prize was awarded, in 2013, jointly in the fields of biology and astronomy, to Marie Dacke [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA], Emily Baird [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], Marcus Byrne [SOUTH AFRICA, UK], […]
Creatures that present poo to their girlfriends as a gift
If you are in Johannesburg this week, you can hear details about the ways a male is judged by the size of his balls, if that male is a dung beetle. It is not uncommon for male dung beetles to obtain sexual favors from females by presenting them with a ball of crap. But of course […]
“Can’t get enough of the poo”
The University of the Watwatersrand writes, on its web site: Can’t get enough of the poo BY ERNA VAN WYK 24 April 2015 “Tonight you will hear about small animals that play around in poo.” With this, Professor Marcus Byrne started off his inaugural lecture delivered in the Senate Room at Wits University on Tuesday, […]
Marcus Byrne explains how dung beetles use the Milky Way
Ig Nobel Prize winner Marcus Byrne explains how dung beetles use the Milky Way, navigationally, to find its way home: [vimeo]80765214[/vimeo] (Thanks to Steve Ting for bringing this to our attention.)
Dung beetle Milky Way Ig Nobel winners implicate the sun
The Scientist magazine reports: Dung beetles (Scarabaeus lamarcki) scurry around cow pastures collecting little balls of poop from steaming heaps of excrement and quickly roll those balls to their nests, where they bury them for a future meal. (See a video of this behavior.) According to new research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the beetles’ […]