Now, the scientists are putting their knowledge of how the beetles sense infrared radiation to use.
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In any event, recent British Columbian winters have not been cold enough to kill the beetles.
Once the beetles hit a tree, it's as good as dead within five years.
If you grew up with the music of the Beetles or with the music of James Brown, that might be the soundtrack to your life.
So it's not them that the beetles are using to orientate themselves.
But this is only ever a temporary home because trees grow and produce shade, so the beetles have to move on every few years.
The beetles swarm up trees in large numbers, killing them by boring through the bark, sapping their nutrients and emitting a damaging blue fungus.
Mr Clinton, keen on seeing the beetles, the Northern Harriers and the Grasshopper Sparrows, says that his visit has a theme, and it is conservation.
Importantly, she put the beetles in a container with blackened walls to be sure the animals were not using information from landmarks on the horizon, which in the wild might be trees, for example.
The beetles performed best when confronted with a perfect starry sky projected on to the planetarium dome, but coped just as well when shown only the diffuse bar of light that is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.
The victims will be destroyed this winter, when the adult beetles have died and the larvae are dormant.
Kampung Kuantan, a sleepy hollow in Kuala Selangor, 75 km north of the capital, is famed for its firefly "show": thousands of the winged beetles appear each night along the Selangor River, flashing their glowing tails.
"I think night-flying moths and night-flying locusts could benefit from using a star compass similar to the one that the dung beetles are using, " she said.
The researchers used Green June Beetles to determine the best place to locate the device.
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The exciting thing about this is that the infrared detectors these beetles use are different from the ones of their Northern Hemisphere cousins.
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Stories of, say, strawberries engineered to produce the natural anti-freeze that occurs in flounder or beetles add to the sense of strangeness.
Whatever the cause of its decline, the hazel pot beetle is now one of 83 rare beetles listed in the UK's Biodiversity Action Plan, which was established to find ways of securing the future of the nation's most endangered species.
They may be down in the dirt but it seems dung beetles also have their eyes on the stars.
And indeed, in the field, Dr Dacke has seen beetles run in to trouble when the Milky Way briefly lies flat on the horizon at particular times of the year.
And if we can get it right for these beetles, the knowledge gained will help a lot of other species on the action plan.
Mr Parzer and Dr Moczek looked at beetles from the east and west of Australia (where it was deliberately introduced to deal with the dung of non-native livestock) and North Carolina, together with an aboriginal population from Italy.
In the western part of the US, pine bark beetles have thrived, partly because of changing temperatures.
From wizards that buff the undead, to giant beetles which jump to avoid attacks, each foe has unique weaknesses.
Mario, now a plumber, and joined by a lanky brother named Luigi, bounced through the Mushroom Kingdom, dodging or bopping enemies in the form of turtles, beetles, and squid, while seeking out magic mushrooms, coins, and hidden stars.
The walls are covered with psychedelic paintings of women and on display on the second floor, thousands of carefully catalogued beetles, stick insects, butterflies and mosquitoes are labelled and pinned to white boards, the life work of owners Manop and Dr Rampa Rattanarithikul, a local husband and wife team of insect specialists.
You can also catch a selection of the work in London at Chris Beetles Gallery.
It roosts between the nodes of mature bamboo and enters the stems through holes made by beetles.
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Finds of animal dung and dung beetles indicate that before the road was built, it was used as a livestock droveway, they said.
Many of the maples now being devoured by China's beetles were planted by his father, also Chicago's mayor, when Dutch elm disease swept through the city nearly three decades ago.
What are the world's hotspots of carabid beetles, micro-moths or nematode worms?
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