Astronomy is often called the world’s oldest science, and it’s likely humans have used their knowledge of the night sky to get from point A to point B since prehistoric times. But this ancient art predates us by far longer than that.
Animals, too, follow the stars, and probably have as long as they've existed. In recent decades, researchers have discovered impressive navigation skills in various birds, in seals, even in a few insects — the latter of which have low-resolution compound eyes.
“A starry sky, as beautiful as it looks to us, would look like a Van Gogh painting to them,” says James Foster, who studies dung beetles at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany. “Just completely blurry.”
Yet despite any limitations, creatures of all kinds look to the stars — celestial signposts from trillions of miles away — to move through the world. It’s a behavior scientists have only begun to understand, and one that may be threatened in our hyper-luminous modern era.
