dung beetles as astronomers

[traveller (Bo)]

Beetle believe it
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21150721

[gary]

Thanks Bo,

Plenty of scope for some one liners here, but it is a great story and thanks for the link.

[Ric]

clever little chaps, that's for sure.

A very interesting article.

[LewisM]

And I thought I was a crappy astronomer.

[Ric]

Originally Posted by LewisM

And I thought I was a crappy astronomer.

Boom Boom

[multiweb (Marc)]

Next to come: polar alignment by bettles.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

How do they cope in areas of severe light pollution?

[traveller (Bo)]

Originally Posted by Larryp

How do they cope in areas of severe light pollution?

I suspect there are not many dung beetles in areas of light pollution (cities), no paddocks and no food source etc (unless they hang around Parliament, plenty of BS there )
Bo

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Originally Posted by traveller

I suspect there are not many dung beetles in areas of light pollution (cities), no paddocks and no food source etc (unless they hang around Parliament, plenty of BS there )
Bo

[REVEREND (Raymond)]

Thanks for the info. We ( south west of WA) are having problems with a very unusually high influx of Ibis, and they are eating all the dung beetles, resulting in a higher number than usual of flies..
Cheers Reverend.

[blink138 (Pat)]

Originally Posted by Larryp

How do they cope in areas of severe light pollution?

they will probably use beetle juice laurie!
pat

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

It would seem that dung beetles know the sky better than many human beings who live in big cities!

Many insects are able to do very sophisticated information processing, linking enormous numbers of sensory inputs, via the insect brain (or even via a net of nerves that leaves out the brain!), to a very large repertoire of output behaviour(s).

The embodied intelligence of insects is very significant, which is why it has taken roboticists 60 years to build machines having an insectoid intelligence!

A lot of insect intelligence is hard-wired as 'stimulus' and 'response', so it is often possible to trick an insect into engaging in a particular behaviour, simply by presenting it with a specific stimulus. (even if the behaviour is inappropriate to the circumstances).

ALL organisms (even individual eukaryotic cells found within a plant's or an animal's body!) engage in sophisticated computation, although they may have little awareness of what they are doing and little choice as to what decision is to be made whan a specific external circumstance occurs.
(see the book "Wetware" by Dennis Bray, which is about the enormous computational ability of a single cell)

It is pretty tough for animals to survive, in the wild, and they have to be ready to respond appropriately in an enormous number of possible circumstances. Annual (as a percentage) mortality is remarkably high, for most animals living in the wild, so the dumb individuals get weeded out!

Consider that even a jellyfish engages in sophisticated behaviours, despite the fact that it has no brain! It does, however, have a nervous system.
Life is remarkably high tech!

cheers, madbadgalaxyman
(writing as 'madbioman' )

I might add, in passing, that the very great biologist E.O. Wilson really 'put the cat among the pigeons' when he showed that quite a lot of human behaviour is stereotyped and can be modelled using stimulus and response!!
As two of the pioneers of artificial intelligence wrote: "A man, like an ant, is a behaving system".
(e.g. You only have to observe two young people 'in love' to know that there is a certain sameness to the admittedly complex rituals that various couples engage in)

The 'tricking' I talked about when discussing an insect's response to a stimulus also can work for human beings, as some humans have figured out how to behave or look, in order to get exactly what they want from others