The 2016 Ig Nobel prize for Physics is awarded to Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth, they are from Hungary, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.
Why dragonflies of various Sympetrum species were attracted by particular black gravestones at which they displayed the same behaviour as at water surfaces. It has been shown that some dragonfly species are polarotactic, that is they detect water by means of the horizontally polarized light reflected from the surface. Therefore, they can be deceived by any surface with similar polarization features. [1]
