Dung beetles are the only known non-human animals that navigate using the faint glow of the Milky Way galaxy to roll their balls of feces in a perfectly straight line away from their competitors.

A closer look

Dung beetles are the only known non-human animals that navigate using the faint glow of the Milky Way galaxy to roll their balls of feces in a perfectly straight line away from their competitors. Researchers proved this by putting the beetles in tiny custom-made planetariums and observing them getting hopelessly lost when the artificial stars were turned off. This means these incredibly sophisticated insects are looking at the vast, awe-inspiring expanse of the cosmos for the sole purpose of efficiently stealing a lump of elephant crap. It is oddly poetic that while ancient humans looked to the stars for divine inspiration and philosophical meaning, nature had already spent millions of years using the same celestial map just to optimize the transportation of literal garbage