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.
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.
[13] 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.
[19] 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.
[20] 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.