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Marie Dacke

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Swedish biologist and researcher

Marie Dacke
Born1973 (age 50–51)
Alma materLund University
TelevisionStudio Natur
AwardsIg 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. Dacke is a Wallenberg Scholar as of 2025. 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.

Early life and career

Dacke went to high school in Landskrona. 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 in 2003, under the supervision of Professor Dan-Eric Nilsson. Her thesis focused on how optical compasses are built, how they are used and how they are adapted to work at low light intensities. During her Ph.D, she discovered a unique compass organ in spiders, a study which was published in Nature in 1999. 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.

After her Ph.D., she spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Visual Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. 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. 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. This research was published in Current Biology. 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 and Current Biology in 2016.

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. Part of this cross-disciplinary research was published in PNAS in 2019 and iScience in 2022.

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). From 2025 she is a Wallenberg Scholar.

Science communication

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

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

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.

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.

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.

External links

References

  1. "Marie Dacke | Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse". kaw.wallenberg.org (in Swedish). Retrieved 31 May 2024.
  2. Jacobsson, Håkan (7 September 2015). "Insekterna lär henne hur man hittar rätt". www.skd.se. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  3. Dacke, Marie (16 March 2024). Celestial Orientation in Dim Light (thesis/doccomp). Lund University.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. "Marie Dacke". Department of Biology. 16 May 2014. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  7. "Marie Dacke – Sveriges Unga Akademi". www.sverigesungaakademi.se. Archived from the original on 29 November 2023. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  8. "Lund University researchers win Ig Nobel Prize". Lund University. 13 September 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  9. "Winners Ig Nobel Prize 2013". Improbable. August 2006. Archived from the original on 9 January 2010. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  10. "Marie Dacke explains how dung beetles navigate". Improbable Research. 24 September 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  11. 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.
  12. 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. PMID 26305929.
  13. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(16)30206-8.pdf
  14. "Prestigious grants for research on biological compasses and the threat to pollinating insects". Lund University. 29 November 2018. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Sweden, Sveriges Television AB, Stockholm, Studio natur (in Swedish), retrieved 4 September 2019{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  18. "Marie Dacke is nominated best science communicator in Sweden". Forskar Grand Prix (in Swedish). Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  19. Pehrsson, Sofie (6 June 2012). "SSF-forskning på TV".
  20. "2019 Verrall Lecture". royensoc.co.uk. Royal Entomological Society. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
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