Getting It Straight: Dynamic Cue Weighting and Orientation Strategies in Ball-Rolling Dung Beetles

Directed movement is fundamental to animal behavior, yet the mechanisms underlying robust orientation remainincompletely understood. The ball-rolling dung beetle offers a unique model system for investigating these mechanismsdue to its distinctive navigational challenges: maintaining a straight-line trajectory while moving backwardand transporting a dung ball. In this thesis, I investigates oriented behavior in dung beetles, focusing primarily onthe diurnal South African species Kheper lamarcki and its characteristic orientation dance.I characterize the triggering factors and motifs of the orientation dance - yaw rotations performed atop thedung ball - demonstrating that these rotation events are triggered by terrain-related disturbances but also occurspontaneously during unimpeded travel (Paper I). Notably, I indicate that rotation events likely serve to map andre-map external directional cues onto the beetle’s internal compass, restoring orientation to shifted cue positionsand improving ambiguous directional signals (Paper I; Paper III).I further demonstrate that dung beetles can maintain their bearings using idiothetic information alone only overshort distances (Paper III). When external cues are available, beetles dynamically weight directional informationfrom multiple sources, including the position of the sun and wind flow, into a combined directional signal. Thisweighting shifts according to cue usefulness, which is reflected in the relative influence of the cues on directionalguidance (Paper II).Finally, I describe cooperative brood ball transportation in two Sisyphus species, revealing that males controlsteering while females contribute passively during flat-ground travel but actively assist in obstacle clearance - adynamic collaboration enabling efficient straight-line orientation without a predefined destination (Paper IV).Together, these findings advance our understanding of how insects maintain robust directional guidance throughthe dynamic integration of multimodal cues, the functional role of rotational