Yum!
You might want to wait until AFTER you eat lunch to read the below . . . Fascinating stuff!
Sacred to ancient Egyptians, the Dung Beetle is truly a fascinating beetle. Without these busy creatures we could not live in the tropics as we would be knee high in dung and swamped by flies. The picture of a happy couple rolling their dung ball down the road gets great attention and brings great joy to our guests on African safari tours. Being hit on the head while driving home at night after a successful days game-viewing by a dung beetle flying in the opposite direction at 20 miles an hour does not bring as much happiness.
There are thousands of types of dung beetle found all over the world on every continent except Antarctica. True Dung Beetles eat dung and do not need to eat or drink anything else because the dung provides all the necessary nutrients. The larvae feed on the undigested plant fiber in the dung, while the adults do not eat solid food at all. Instead, they use their mouthparts to squeeze and suck the juice from the manure, a liquid full of micro-organisms and other nutrients.
The Dung Beetles’ importance to the ecosystem can be seen in the study of a small 1.5 Kg pile of Elephant dung on the African savannah. In two hours, the small pile of dung attracted 16 000 dung beetles of various shapes and sizes. Between the beetles, they had eaten and / or buried that dung completely in just those two hours.
Another good example can be seen in Australia. Before 1788 there were no cattle in Australia, and therefore, the dung beetles had not evolved the ability to deal with all the cow dung–they were only specialists at eating marsupial dung. There are about 20 million cattle in Australia and each one drops about 12 pads a day. This is a huge amount of dung with no beetles to get rid of it. The dung fouled millions of hectares of grazing land and gave birth to Australia’s infamous fly reputation. They brought in new types of dung beetles to manage the cow dung and the problem is being solved.
There are three basic groups of dung beetles: rollers, tunnelers, and dwellers. The dwellers simply live and breed in the dung, the tunnelers bury the dung where they find it, and the rollers roll round balls of dung off to a safe place to bury it. Regardless as to how they do it, they all lay their eggs in the dung and leave them to hatch with a food source of dung that allows the larva to grow and metamorphosis into adult beetles.
See below for the ultimate dung beetle race!
