Marie Dacke

Last updated

Marie Dacke
Born1973 (age 50–51)
NationalitySwedish
Alma mater Lund University
TelevisionStudio Natur
Awards Ig Nobel Prize, Forskar Grand Prix

Marie Ann-Charlotte Dacke is a professor of Sensory Biology, at the Lund Vision Group in Lund University, Lund, Sweden. Her research focuses on nocturnal and diurnal compass systems, using the dung beetle as a model organism. In 2022 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dacke has a keen interest for the education of the general public and among other things act as a panel member of the Swedish TV show Studio Natur. In 2013 she received an Ig Nobel Prize for her work on the navigation system of dung beetles. Since 2018, she is also an honorary professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Contents

Early life and career

Dacke went to high school in Landskrona. [1] After graduating from high school she attended Lund University where she studied biology. Here, she completed her Ph.D. on Celestial Orientation in Dim Light. [2] During this time, she discovered a unique compass organ in spiders, a study which was published in Nature in 1999. [3] A few years later she revealed the first evidence of an animal able to use the dim pattern of polarized moon-light for orientation, a study also published in Nature in 2003. [4] She completed her Ph.D. in 2003 under the supervision of Professor Dan-Eric Nilsson.

After her Ph.D., she spent two years at the Centre for Visual Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra as a postdoctoral fellow. [5] In 2007, she returned to Lund University as a research fellow and in 2011 she became an associate professor in Sensory Biology. She became a Professor in Sensory Biology in 2017.

Dacke's research is focused on navigation and orientation in insects, in particular orientation in dung beetles. [6] She is interested in the celestial compass (which is the use of the sky to guide navigation). By exploring the interface between behaviour, neurobiology and cognition, her research tries to understand how diurnal and nocturnal compass systems of insects work. In 2013 she, together with Marcus Byrne, Emily Baird, Clark Scholtz and Eric Warrant, received the Ig Nobel Prize in the joint astronomy and biology category for showing that nocturnal dung beetles can use the Milky Way as a compass. [7] [8] [9] This research was published in Current Biology . [10] In 2014, Dacke received an Excellent Young Researchers grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) to continue her research on the compass systems of dung beetles, exploring the link between electrophysiology and behaviour. Part of this research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2015 [11] and Current Biology in 2016. [12]

In 2018 Dacke received funding from the European Research Council to expand further on her work, and define the principles behind multimodal navigational systems, studying brain activity in dung beetles as they perform their orientation behaviour. [13] Part of this cross-disciplinary research was published in PNAS in 2019 [14] and iScience in 2022. [15]

Dacke has been elected a fellow of the Young Academy of Sweden (2011), Royal Physiographic Society of Lund (2017), Royal Entomological Society of London (2018), Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2022) and Societas Ad Sciendum (2023).

Science communication

Dacke has been a panel member on the Swedish TV show Studio Natur (currently streaming on SVT Play) since 2010. [16]

In 2012 Dacke was named best science communicator in Sweden in the national competition Forskar Grand Prix (Science Grand Prix). [17]

In 2012 Dacke was one of the scientists to appear in a series about research and researchers produced by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and TV4. [18]

In 2019 she gave the Royal Entomological Society's Verrall Lecture at the Natural History Museum, London, speaking about As the crow flies, and the beetle rolls: straight-line orientation from behaviour to neurons. [19]

Dacke has authored two books; Trädgårdsdjur - myllret och mångfalden som växterna älskar (Roos & Tegnér, ISBN   9789188953629) (co-authored with Låtta Skogh) in 2020, and Taggad att leva - igelkottens liv, historiska resa och hotande framtid (Roos & Tegnér, ISBN   9789189215368), in 2021.


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dung beetle</span> Informal group of insects

Dung beetles are beetles that feed on feces. Some species of dung beetles can bury dung 250 times their own mass in one night.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Magnetoreception</span> Biological ability to perceive magnetic fields

Magnetoreception is a sense which allows an organism to detect the Earth's magnetic field. Animals with this sense include some arthropods, molluscs, and vertebrates. The sense is mainly used for orientation and navigation, but it may help some animals to form regional maps. Experiments on migratory birds provide evidence that they make use of a cryptochrome protein in the eye, relying on the quantum radical pair mechanism to perceive magnetic fields. This effect is extremely sensitive to weak magnetic fields, and readily disturbed by radio-frequency interference, unlike a conventional iron compass.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moken</span> Ethnic group of the Mergui Archipelago and Surin Islands

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feces</span> Solid or semisolid remains of undigested food

Feces are the solid or semi-solid remains of food that was not digested in the small intestine, and has been broken down by bacteria in the large intestine. Feces contain a relatively small amount of metabolic waste products such as bacterially altered bilirubin, and dead epithelial cells from the lining of the gut.

Steven M. Reppert is an American neuroscientist known for his contributions to the fields of chronobiology and neuroethology. His research has focused primarily on the physiological, cellular, and molecular basis of circadian rhythms in mammals and more recently on the navigational mechanisms of migratory monarch butterflies. He was the Higgins Family Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Medical School from 2001 to 2017, and from 2001 to 2013 was the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology. Reppert stepped down as chair in 2014. He is currently distinguished professor emeritus of neurobiology.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flightless dung beetle</span> Genus of beetles

The flightless dung beetle is a species of dung beetle endemic to a few areas of South Africa, including the Addo Elephant National Park, Amakhala Game Reserve and the Buffalo Valley Game Farm. It is the only species in the genus Circellium. The loss of flight allows the beetle to use the empty space below the elytra as a carbon dioxide storage tank, creating a unique breathing mechanism which conserves water, a valuable survival trait in the arid regions it lives in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal navigation</span> Ability of many animals to find their way accurately without maps or instruments

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<i>Scarabaeus satyrus</i> Species of beetle

Scarabaeus satyrus is an African species of dung beetle. These beetles roll a ball of dung for some distance from where it was deposited, and bury it, excavating an underground chamber to house it. An egg is then laid in the ball, the growing larva feeding on the dung, pupating, and eventually emerging as an adult.

Susanne Åkesson is a Swedish migration expert. She is a professor of Zoology at Lund University. She was a member of the team that proposed that the stripes on zebras deter insects like tabanidae.

Professor Marcus Byrne won the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for Biology/Astronomy along with: Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Clarke Scholtz, and Eric Warrant, for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. This research has practical applications, for example helping how to develop complex visual systems.

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Many animals are able to navigate using the Sun as a compass. Orientation cues from the position of the Sun in the sky are combined with an indication of time from the animal's internal clock.

<i>Euoniticellus intermedius</i> Species of beetle

Euoniticellus intermedius is a species of dung beetle in the family Scarabaeidae. E. intermedius is native to Southeastern Africa but has spread to the United States, Mexico, and Australia. E. intermedius acts as an important agricultural agent due to its improvement of soil quality and removal of parasitic pests.

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References

  1. ↑ Jacobsson, Håkan (7 September 2015). "Insekterna lär henne hur man hittar rätt". www.skd.se. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  2. ↑ Dacke, Marie (16 March 2024). Celestial Orientation in Dim Light (thesis/doccomp). Lund University.
  3. ↑ Dacke, M.; Nilsson, D.-E.; Warrant, E. J.; Blest, A. D.; Land, M. F.; O'Carroll, D. C. (September 1999). "Built-in polarizers form part of a compass organ in spiders". Nature. 401 (6752): 470–473. Bibcode:1999Natur.401..470D. doi:10.1038/46773. S2CID   4384284.
  4. ↑ Dacke, Marie; Nilsson, Dan-Eric; Scholtz, Clarke H.; Byrne, Marcus; Warrant, Eric J. (July 2003). "Insect orientation to polarized moonlight". Nature. 424 (6944): 33. doi:10.1038/424033a. PMID   12840748.
  5. ↑ "Marie Dacke". Department of Biology. 16 May 2014. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  6. ↑ "Marie Dacke – Sveriges Unga Akademi". www.sverigesungaakademi.se. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  7. ↑ "Lund University researchers win Ig Nobel Prize". Lund University. 13 September 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  8. ↑ "Winners Ig Nobel Prize 2013". Improbable. August 2006. Archived from the original on 9 January 2010. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  9. ↑ "Marie Dacke explains how dung beetles navigate". Improbable Research. 24 September 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  10. ↑ Dacke, Marie; Baird, Emily; Byrne, Marcus; Scholtz, Clarke H.; Warrant, Eric J. (2013). "Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation". Current Biology. 23 (4): 298–300. Bibcode:2013CBio...23..298D. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034 . PMID   23352694.
  11. ↑ El Jundi, Basil; Warrant, Eric J.; Byrne, Marcus J.; Khaldy, Lana; Baird, Emily; Smolka, Jochen; Dacke, Marie (2015). "Neural coding underlying the cue preference for celestial orientation". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (36): 11395–11400. Bibcode:2015PNAS..11211395E. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1501272112 . PMC   4568659 .
  12. ↑ https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(16)30206-8.pdf
  13. ↑ "Prestigious grants for research on biological compasses and the threat to pollinating insects". Lund University. 29 November 2018. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
  14. ↑ Dacke, Marie; Bell, Adrian T. A.; Foster, James J.; Baird, Emily J.; Strube-Bloss, Martin F.; Byrne, Marcus J.; El Jundi, Basil (2019). "Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (28): 14248–14253. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11614248D. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1904308116 . PMC   6628800 . PMID   31235569.
  15. ↑ Shaverdian, Shahrzad; Dirlik, Elin; Mitchell, Robert; Tocco, Claudia; Webb, Barbara; Dacke, Marie (2022). "Weighted cue integration for straight-line orientation". iScience. 25 (10). Bibcode:2022iSci...25j5207S. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.105207. PMC   9583106 . PMID   36274940.
  16. ↑ Sweden, Sveriges Television AB, Stockholm, Studio natur (in Swedish), retrieved 4 September 2019{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  17. ↑ "Marie Dacke is nominated best science communicator in Sweden". Forskar Grand Prix (in Swedish). Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  18. ↑ Pehrsson, Sofie (6 June 2012). "SSF-forskning på TV".
  19. ↑ "2019 Verrall Lecture". royensoc.co.uk. Royal Entomological Society. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
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