Beetles – Artfully Wild

Dung Beetles are members of the order Coleoptera, which include insects that have hardened wing cases and not papery wings like other insects. As members of coleoptera, they belong to the super-order Endopterygota, which constitutes insects whose bodies undergo a drastic transformation from how they are in the larval stage to how they are in the adult stage. Other insects that share their super-order are bees, butterflies, flies and ants.

Here are 5 fun facts about dung beetles:

We all know that dung beetles love to eat poop. But research shows that dung beetles have a blatant preference for herbivore poop, given the high nutritional value it has from the undigested plant matter. Carnivore and omnivore droppings which contain much less nutrition than what beetles require, are only consumed occasionally.
Did you know that dung beetles have been around from the past 30 million years? Fossil records in South America show prehistoric dung balls, similar to the dung balls today’s dung beetles make, around sites where herbivorous dinosaurs were found. Looks like someone was a good samaritan, keeping dino poop off the streets.
Although the quintessential image of a dung beetle is that of a beetle pushing around a ball of poop, most dung beetles actually don’t indulge in this behavior. Many dung beetles either live within piles of animal poop or burrow holes into the ground below the poop, as these help the beetles gain quick access to the poop when they’re hungry. Dung beetles only roll their dung when they need to carry food to their nests, which may be far away from the pile of fresh poop.
One type of dung beetle from Africa, the Scarabaeus satyrus, uses the Milky Way Galaxy to navigate and travel. When this beetle needs to transport its ball of poop, it waits for it to get dark, gets on top of the poop ball, looks towards the sky, finds the milky way and uses the stars to make its way home. If anything blocks their view of the stars (like scientists did when they placed tiny hats on these dung beetles to check their navigation reflexes when blind), these beetles will wander aimlessly like lost puppies. Talk about requiring celestial guidance.
If you thought a tiny hat didn’t complete its trousseau, don’t worry. There’s more to come. To test whether dung beetle poop-ball-rolling efficiency was affected by the heat of the midday sun, scientists put selected dung beetles in tiny silicon booties. They noticed that the beetles wearing the booties took lesser breaks and were faster in their walk & poop-rolling.

Bonus

With all this talk of poop-rolling, don’t you want to know what weight a dung beetle can pull during each poop-rolling session? A dung beetle can pull as high as 1,141 times its own body weight! That’s the equivalent of a 70 kilograms human being pulling six double decker buses filled with people!

Here is what we do in the name of scientific inquiry: