Dung Beetle Mania!

it's even more amazing. And yet somehow I have had a terrible habit of not really giving these animals a second glance um or any kind of a deeper look in all my time just reading about stuff I know. And yeah, they are potent with symbolism, and they're potent with pooh in they turn to be really interesting little characters who are doing a number of clever things with feces. Yeah,

we're of course talking about dung beetles. And really, I mean, you can take any lead in you want with these animals. You're you into mummies, you into Egyptology, Dune beat? Are you into poop and poop related science? Du I mean that covers I think at least of the listeners right there. If you're if you're not into mummies, then you're into poop one of the two. Oh yeah, and I guess the subset of this would be like you into dancing on your poop beetles, Yeah, you into or maybe you

want a space angle. There's a space angle coming up too. I mean, dung beetles really have it all. And and I feel bad for not really not really giving them a, you know, a second look this whole time, even though you know, I've definitely been fascinated by a various uh Egyptian topics in the past, and and you see the scare of beetle everywhere, and for some reason, I never thought, hey, maybe I should look into the symbolism of that scared beetle. I'm always more distracted by any of the other um

items in the rich iconography. Yeah, ancient Egyptians they really exalted dung beetles because they witnessed them doing two things which really captive captivated ancient Egyptian imagination, and it overlaid this more sort of poetic interpretation. And of these two things that they saw these dung beetles doing, first they saw them rolling dung balls, right, and they were like, this is very interesting, and we've all seen video of this.

It pops up in just about every animal documentary ever because it is it's fascinating and kind of humorous to watch them pedal it with their their phind legs. Yeah. And second, they observe these dung beetles dancing on top of it, and they thought, maybe this is a kind of worshiping of the sun. And then they put it together with huh, that that dung rolling could be linked with nocturnal activity of Capri, the god of the rising sun.

So this scare beetle god was believed to push the setting sun along the sky in the same manner as the beatle with his ball of dung. Alright, so they saw a sort of a cosmic model and what the scare beetle is doing because he already had this this idea, the story of this god rolling the sun across the horizon. Right, they see these little guys doing it in miniature, and I think, ah, Yes. And moreover, unbeknownst to ancient Egyptians, larvae might be laying inside of some of those balls

of dung. And what would happen as they would see this completely fully formed beetle emerged from the ball And they didn't realize that the larvae was undergoing a complete metamorphos within that ball. So again they were ascribing these sort of magical qualities to this beetle and saying, ah, this must be some sort of rebirth. So they sort of saw this kind of a spontaneous generation kind of scenario where the young were just emerging from the ball

of dung. Yeah, and if they began to symbolize rebirth, yeah. And so this apparently becomes a prominent funerary decoration throughout the New Kingdom, which went from about the fifty to ten seventy b c. And during that time that you see all these scare amulets placed over the heart of a mummified the individual. The interesting thing about these heart scared is that they were essentially kind of a magical hack, like a spell, intended to just give you a little

leg up in the afterlife. Because we've we've discussed before, I think we went into it in the problem of Hell that we're talking about various models of the afterlife. Um, the cosmology of ancient Egypt was was really rich, and they have this this really elaborate afterlife, and there's a judgment that takes place where your your your soul, your

heart is weighed against the feather of truth. Now, you'd have to feel pretty sure about yourself to go into that that scenario and and and feel that you're gonna you're gonna triumph. And as you as we see in in all the various funerary and practices of ancient Egypt. Uh, those with the power to do so, we're all about preparing themselves because the afterlife is going to be dangerous, it's gonna be complex. You need your un your your servants, you need your goods, you need spells, you need all

of these things. So you're gonna so you're gonna enter into your sarcophagus with his heart scared. That will serve to give you just a little bit of like a plus one or a plus two during that trial. Yeah, if your heart wasn't so pure, perhaps this talisman, this the scaub, would help to write things when your heart was weighed against this feather. Yeah, otherwise you're annihilated. There's no there's no even going to to hell. They're just

you're just gone. Isn't there like a little animal next to or a little creature next to the scale that gobbles up the heart? If it if it's not a worthy one. Yeah, the crocodile headed uh I believe his name was I may have that wrong. My apologies to the crocodile headed devour of souls if that is the case. So all of that should give everybody a good idea of these humble dung beetles. And even though they have a rich past in ancient Egypt, to day we give

them nary a thought. And we should because they have been rolling these dung balls for something like thirty million years and um, they have been astronomers in a sense, and we'll get to that in a moment, but they are pretty amazing. Let's look at some of their more physical attributes. Yeah, and I want to add that they're

they're just about everywhere. You'll find dung beetles of one type or another on every continent except Antarctica because obviously they would have a tough time of it in Antarctica. And in their use of dung, they play a vital role in dealing with with our waste. They are they are very important UH species, So they're not just mere curios that just roll some dung around. They play an important role in UH in the environment. Yeah, we'll look

at a specific example of that later too. So, yeah, there are more than five thousand species of dung beetles, and typical dung beetle appearance is a grooved shield, large strong front limbs for digging and fighting, and elongated back legs for holding onto dung balls while rolling them along. They've got some long flying wings that are folded there under hard wing covers. And some of the well known families in the dung beetle super family are the stag

best and scab beetles. Uh. Their length can range from about point zero zero four inches to two point four inches and uh, they have six legs in total, usually brown in color, but some of them can be brightly colored. Yeah, some of them are quite beautiful. In fact, the rainbow scarub actually has this this ter destined look to it, like a piece of jewelry. Yeah, they can be really gorgeous and very strong. The male Otho flags taurus can pull one thousand onety one times its own body weight.

Now that is the equivalent of an average person pulling six double decker buses full of people. Who So these are powerful creatures, yeah, I mean compared to their size obviously. And another interesting fact is that they are committed parents. And this is rather surprising because when we when you think about the insect world, um, at least if you're like me, you tend to think of just um from a human perspective, almost like a cruel um, just heartless scenario.

I mean, there's there's no such thing as insect politics, uh, to to quote Dr Brundle, But with these particular creatures, with the Dunge beagles, one or both of the parents stay with the larva until they are mature, which can take up to four months. And uh, yeah, this is quite unusual in the insect world. Yeah, almost. I mean you can get really like, you can really project some human nous onto this because it seems almost like a little courting thing here. This is from the San Diego Zoo.

It says after a chance encounter at a dumb pet, male and female rollers established a pair bond. The male offers the female a giant sized brood ball of fiecies. If she accepts it, they roll it away together or the female rides on top of the ball. Well. They It is a refreshingly sweet relationship compared to a lot of other models of insect courtship. That come to mind where everyone's getting there their head chewed off, that's what I'm saying, torn off, yeah, um, yeah, And they'll find

a soft place to bury the ball before mating. Yeah, and then they'll care for it. It's not just a matter of just pumping your larva into the belly of some sort of a host creature. There. There's almost again to project kind of a family structure here. Yeah, and certain cephalodis miss dung beetles even made for life so beautiful. Now, I know what what everyone's thinking aboutre you're thinking. I know, I didn't come into an episode about dung beetles to

hear about their family. I want to hear about the consumption of pooh. How does that work? How does that make sense? Right? Because it's a waste product to you might easily say, this is something that another animal has has sucked the life out of, and then this is the husk of that of that that consumption. So so

what is there for a dung beetle to even consume? Well, quite a lot, just because it's just I mean what the important thing to take home here is that even though it is a waste product, not all of the nutrients are are missing, particularly when you look at herbi wars. I mean herbivar poop is going to be you know, consists mostly of undigestible vegetation, right, so you've got a lot of plant material there, and you have water content as well, which is going to be crucial in your

dry environments. Now, most species subsist almost exclusively on the excrement of other organisms, though they can sometimes feast on carrion, leaf litter, mushrooms or decaying fruit. Right, never human flesh, just straight up carnivorous scared beetles. If you saw that in The Mummy the movie. Um, don't take that to

the bank. Yeah. Um. They can have really specific appetites for poop, so you can't just assume that you put a big pile of poop in front of them and they'll just roll away with it and be happy with it.

And in Australia in seventeen seventy eight they found this out the hard way, And the reason for that is that they had I wor did a bunch of cows and other large livestock that were not indigenous to the area, and they just these things are gonna poop everywhere, and they thought, well, the scare beetles, that the dung beetles will take care of this, right, sure, but this the dung beetles were like, no way, I don't know what this is. It doesn't smell right to me, and they

basically turned their noses up at it. What happened is that in that part of Australia they had a huge infestation of flies and other parasites that moved in and said well, I'll take it, and they ended up having to import uh, dung beetles that would eat the exprement of these cows and other large livestock. Well, that's just another page from a familiar book. When we start messing around with the ecological structure. Uh, then things are out

of whack. A little more cold rot water because the bath is too hot, a little more hot because it's too cold, and then the bath is overflowed. Yeah, there's just one factory cascade. Indeed. Now they also they also sort of like a certain scent profile to their dung, and a lot of that has to do with the diet of the organism. Yeah, well they like it strong, correct, they do. In fact, many species of dung beetle prefer omnivore dung such as human dung or or your monkey dung.

Uh and uh, and this is actually going to be more odorous dunk stinky, you're dune, Yeah, because it does have that plant material and has the meat, and it has all of the bacteria that is breaking it down and making it very smelly. But how do we know that they prefer it? Well, some very committed scientists, including researcher Why Hoback, a professor at the University of Nebraska

A Kearney. They used these pitfall traps, large buckets buried in the ground, and it contained feces from a bunch of different species or a dead rotting rat in the bottom carrion, or the remains of dead animals can also serve as a food source for dung beetles, as we had said before, So the researchers wanted to compare this to the dung samples, and two summers of work in two thousand and ten two thousand eleven, the team captured more than nine thousand dung beetles of fifteen different species,

and of the dung samples, human and chimpanzee feces, both omnivores here attracted the most dung beetles. The dead rat came in next, followed by pig droppings uh, then poop from the carnivorous species, which included uh lion and tiger dung, and then dead last herbivores, which again brings us back to the Australian UH example, where we had all this herbivore poop just setting around and the dungees were not

the right dung beetles to eat it. And in essence, I guess you could say that some of these beetles are playing with their poop, but really this is a matter of survival. It just looks like playing because they're going to do one of three things with these balls of poop. They're gonna roll it, They're gonna roll it into a tunnel, or they're going to dwell within it. Okay, so we have the rollers, the tunnelers, and the dwellers.

The rollers are out there rolling this ball of of excrement just across the across the ground, and those are the ones that we often see and these compelling nature videos. The tunnelers are taking that ball of poop and they're going underground with it, and then the dwellers are dwelling within the poop mount Yeah, they're saying, why not. I mean, this is a food source. I can live inside of it nice and cool. Yeah, so we have all these are dung beetles, but they found sort of different levels

of exploitation of this resource, the resource being poop. Yeah, and again we should mention to like, not only is this a food source for them, but they can also make a nest of it to transfer their eggs too.

So in this other sense though, they are using these dung balls to cool off with, and um, it seems kind of oddit for but now consider you know, the species that are hanging out in substit or in Africa and the desert where that that ground can get up to sixty degrees celsius and get really really hot, and there's lots of dung beetles competing for this dung and they've got rolled as fast as they can, and yet they have some really clever ways of trying to cool themselves.

So so how did they cool themselves off in this this hot environment with something that you just don't You don't think of poop is having any cooling elements. If anything, you think of it as being steaming and hot well researchers Yoki and Smolka at All they studied how they cooled themselves off, and they detailed it in the paper. Dung beetles use their dung balls as a mobile thermal refuge. And this is This is from the beginning of the paper,

and I just love it. It says quote. Using infrared thermography and behavioral experiments, we show here that dung beetles use their dung balls as a mobile thermal refuge onto which they climbed to cool down while rolling across hot soil. We further demonstrate that the hoist ball functions not only as a portable platform, but also as a heat sink, which effectively cools the beetle as it rolls or climbs

onto it. I'm not gonna get I'm not gonna get deep into this study here, but I do want to tell you that if you look into the study, you will see where they have slipped these little socks onto their feet and their hind legs um as they are rolling the balls. Because they've done various things to try to determine how much heat is uh entering the surface

of their feet and how they're cooling themselves off. But essentially, as they're pressing onto that ball, which is a lot cooler than the soil than they're cooling off from it, they're they're also doing this what looks to be a dance on top of the ball. An indeed, to the uninformed, I it definitely looks like they're just stopping getting on

topping the ball and dancing around. But but really you could you you should think a bit more in terms of like a sailor climbing up the rigging of a ship to see what's on the horizon, because that, as it turns out, is key to the whole thing, because when when did they actually climb a top and do their dance. They do it when they're when their first leaving the pile of poop, the main depositive poop. They

do it when they encounter an obstacle. So, in other words, they're doing it when they need to see what the lay of the land is, where are they taking this ball, what is their their ultimate goal with it? And they are possibly doing it to cool themselves because they found that um that it usually happens at the hottest point during the midday heat, so they see more incidences of them getting up on the ball and doing this little jig. And yeah, some of it though, is like a little

lookout to see, like, who are my competitors here? He's gaining on me um. But any little advantage that they can get like that they cool themselves off for the briefest of moments helps them when they are making this trek across the soil. And by the way, this is a straight line that they are rolling these balls into and along the way they're often having to deal with rival dung beetles fighting them for their their their precious ball, which is another thing just to keep in mind about

their their journey. Yeah, and and again they've got to stay on that street path because it turns out this is very intentional to have this straight path and they may actually be using the milky way to orient themselves. And this experiment is pretty adorable. Yeah. This one was published in two thirteen in Current Biology, and it actually earned a two thirteen Ignoble Prize. Which doesn't mean that

it's again we've talked about the Nobel Prizes before. It doesn't mean that it's necessarily um useless science or that it's uh, you know, completely silly, But maybe it just has a silly element to it, such as dung beetles wearing hats. Earlier they were wearing socks in a different experiment. This time they're wearing hats. Because how are you going to test Uh their navigational skills are they? Are they depending upon the night sky for their movements or the

orientation of the milky way? Uh? You have to put a little hat on there, a little little visor to keep them from looking up. Indeed, so what did they do. They set up an outdoor circular arena full of sand, and they put the dung beetles in the middle with their ball of dung, and they looked at the path they took to get to the edge of their arena. Now, half of those dung beetles could see the starry night no moon, by the way, and the other half had

those little hats on that you just described. Now, the hats only covered the dorsal eyes, the ones on the top of their heads, and the ventral eyes were uncovered, so they could still see that. So, of course, those who are be hatted had a hard time navigating. They didn't have the stars to help them navigate. And they tested this again by placing the beetles in a planetarium, inside an actual planetarium. It's an actual planetarium. Is brilliant, right,

because they can manipulate um the planetarium. They can make it completely dark, they can just have a full moon, no moon, or the milky way. And they found that the beatles could vigate with the stars or just with a milky way, which is again a diffuse band of light surrounding a density of stars. And it's not just starlight that is important to them. In two thousand three, researchers found that one species of dung beetle, the African

Scarabbas zambanius, navigates by using polarization patterns in moonlight. And this was actually the first proof that any animal can use polarized moonlight for orientation. Now you had mentioned the competition is really fierce, and I just wanted to mention that according to dung beetle expert John Freehand quote, the behavior of the beatles was much misunderstood until the pioneering studies of John Henri Fabre. For example, Fabre corrected the myth that a dung beetle would seek aid from dung

beetles when confronted by obstacles. This is what was got it because they probably probably observed like three or four dung beetles pushing on a single ball of dung. Yeah. There, of course, no one's trying to help anybody and that scenario, they're just all fighting for the resources exactly, and uh, Freehance says by painstaking observations and experiments, Fabruree found but this seeming helpers were in fact robbers awaiting an opportunity

to steal the rollers food source. Now think about this next statistic. I'm talking about at one point five kilogram or a three point three pound load of elephant dung that gets decimated by sixteen thousand dung beetles in two hours. And this is from Dr John Capanier in his book, who was describing how very efficiently these beetles will bury, eat, or just roll away all the dung and just how

many competitors there are for it. Yeah, that's an incredible stat and it really does underline their important role as a recycler in the environment, especially when you have mega fauna going around just completely unloading uh you know, over the place. Indeed, so what does this mean. It means that when it comes to uh, I don't know what would you say, like, uh, to get in that ball, to to obtaining the prize, you're going to have to engage in a little bit of combat. Oh yeah, you

know that. What keeps coming to mind for me when we keep talking about this, I keep thinking about mad Max, particularly the road wire, where the commodity that everyone's arrestient is gasoline, and so everyone's after the gasoline and all these souped up vehicles with spikes on the front and gatling guns and grappling hooks and what have you, and they're just roaring across this desert environment. And I see a lot of that in the scare of beetle. There's

a precious commodity at hand. There's a lot of competition for that commodity, and in order to to obtain it, to defend it, and to actually do something with it, you've you've got a arm up, you do. And this is where it becomes so important. This uh you know again, a thirty million year odyssey with poop for for dung beetles that they actually evolve horns to compete dung. Now Nicola Watson and Lee Simmons of the University of Western Australian Perth. What did they do to find out how

important horns are. Well, they pitted female dung beetles Alpha fascists Sagittarius against each other in a race for dung, and they were matched for body size. They're all in the same weight bracket. I suppose um females with bigger horns managed to collect more dung and provide, you know, better for their offspring. And they publish their findings in the March two thousand and ten edition of the Proceedings

of the Royal Society. So again here you have this idea. Well, you know, if you if you've evolved to have the biggest um pair of these horns, then perhaps you're going to be much better fit to fight off your competitors and provide for your family. The other interesting thing about the horns, and this with this particular species from this study, is that the female has a central horn arrangement like

a rhino. And again they're they're much larger, uh, and then the male has like smaller kind of side by side devil horn scenario going on. So it's not just to simply a matter of oh, well, you know, one one minute. One side of the species has small horns, in otherlane has big ones. It's like it's a different arrangement. It's a different morphology that has has emerged in the males versus the females with with with a different purpose in mind. Yeah, and even the tunnelers will have different

horns than the non tunnelers. And it made me think about the antlers episode when we were talking about deer and different species having different lengths and different ways to sort of tangle with them. Yeah. I was actually reading through a Douglas J. Inland's excellent book Animal Weapons, which is all about the evolution of of things such as horns and antlers and other defensive mechanisms and this sort

of the arms race of evolution. Uh. And he pointed out that species that fight one on one and often have elaborate horns, and species that fight in chaotic scrambles do not. So in the dung beetles, for instance, that dunge bill is out there on that that ball of excrement. Having to fight three or four at once, you'll see a less impressive display. But if it's one on one, particularly in a tunnel, that's where you'll see really crazy arrangements.

Uh in one says burrows are probably the most widespread ecological situation leading to the evolution of extreme weapons. Uh and this is because the tunnels are localized, they're readily defendable and uh and and indeed some of these, uh these arrangements are just really intense because you can imagine that that tunnel environment, it's all about front loading your your weaponry and and defending the entrance at all costs. Well,

and that makes sense. You're gonna respond to it in a certain way, or I would say that biology and nature is going to respond to it in a certain way. And I was just even thinking back to the episode on Left Handed People, and we were talking about the castle in Scotland, in which that I believe it was the generations of uh of it was its soldiers there who were defending the castle. They were left handed, and they had built the castle specifically so that they would

have the advantage when they came around the corners. So about the tunnel, So in that same sense, here you see, you know, a kind of evolution or adaptation to try to be as effective as you possibly can. And in all of this, another thing to keep in mind about that commodity, that precious commodity of dung, is that it

loses its um its power quickly. So any time that the dung beetles are having to just pounce on it, they have to they have to take advantage of it quickly because it's going to lose its potency, it's going to lose its its value. And that's another reason why the elephant dun disappears so quickly, because there's a there's a half life on this stuff. Indeed, um why there's not a Disney pick? So are film all this? I just don't know. Yeah, it seems like there's plenty there.

I mean, just they're they're they're already a little more comfy and a little more relatable as organisms do to their they're sort of family structure, if you will. They have this very animated thing that they do, pushing this ball around or living in tunnels. They're they're elaborate looking. There's a rich mythology associated with them. It seems like you could just go wild. Yeah, and they're kind of romantic and star guard write. You've got the astronomy going exactly.

They're looking up at the heavens and experiments they're wearing socks and hats. I mean, really, what more could you ask for? Yeah? Done, Beatles life. That's what we need, all right. Um, you guys, if you are interested in finding out more about what we do and other past episodes, you can visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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