Johannesburg - I bet you’ve never thought of dung beetles as particularly romantic creatures with stars in their eyes.
You may have seen them determinedly rolling their balls of dung along a bush road, often with an accompanying female perched persistently on the ball, but did you know they navigate by the stars? Apparently they’ve become the first animals that have been proved to use the Milky Way for direction-finding.
If dung beetles can find their way by following the stars, it makes me wonder about all the hi-tech navigation aids we humans need when we travel – from Garmins and TomToms to jet pilot devices. Have we lost our innate path-finding abilities?
I visited the Bartolomeu Dias Museum in Mossel Bay (go there – it’s great) and marvelled at the life-size replica of Dias’s caravel which he sailed from the west coast of Europe to make landing in 1488 at the bay he called St Blaise, now Mossel Bay.
The caravel seems so small, he had few maps (and those he did have had large areas marked “There be Monsters” and other similarly unhelpful information) yet he and his motley crew sailed successfully halfway around the world, not even knowing if they were going to fall off the edge.
It has taken me more than seven decades to realise that I have no sense of direction whatsoever (so obviously I wasn’t a dung beetle in a previous life). But I wonder if us modern humans have now lost that instinctive sense of direction along with our loping gait and hairy backs?
When you travel – let’s say you’re going on a road trip to the coast – could you imagine just setting off in the direction of where you know the sea to be, then navigating by the stars? Although in most places in South Africa we can still see the stars, can you imagine the husband/ wife arguments that would rage even more fiercely because, if men won’t ask directions, (all women are aware of this familiar syndrome) then how on earth will they identify the Pleiades?
Lemmings are believed to instinctively follow their mass death route. Millions of wildebeest know when to start the great migration. Monarch butterflies know when to start fluttering from southern Canada to central Mexico. Barn swallows know how to get from Dorset to Dullstroom.
But it appears we modern travellers have to rely almost entirely on external sources such as maps, cellphones and GPSes.
It makes me wonder about Darwin, the evolution of the species and the survival of the fittest.
Bon voyage. - Sunday Independent