Top 5 Dung Beetle Facts

Ants often get a lot of credit for lifting twenty to fifty times their own weight, but this species of dung beetle, also known as Onthophagus taurus, takes the cake. Actually, they take it, spin it around and hurl it across the room without breaking a sweat. According to research published in 2010, they are able to lift one thousand one hundred and forty-one times their weight. That’s like some gym bro benching 3 full cement trucks. Well actually, yeah, that is the strength-to-weight ratio, but no, a 6 foot tall dung beetle couldn’t actually do this, because that’s not how muscles or physics work. The authors of that research say taurus scarabs use this strength to their advantage during mating season, when males must fend off competitors and claim a female to mate with.

By eating and burying all manner of animal droppings, dung beetles aren’t just helping to keep your boots clean, they’re helping to build soil. Manure is of course a great fertilizer, and many species of dung beetle scatter and bury the stuff, ensuring a wide distribution of the precious nutrients therein. Scientists from the University of Helsinki recently determined that dung beetles even play a role in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Cows, as you probably know, burp and fart methane, and the piles of crap they leave behind, if left undisturbed, can decompose anaerobically, releasing methane. Dung beetles in Northern Europe spend most of their lives digging around inside cow pats though, and their tunnels bring air into the cow turd complex, preventing the anaerobic formation of methane. And what’s unfortunate is...

Over the last twenty to thirty years, dung beetle populations have been declining in various parts of the world. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that drugs given to livestock to treat and prevent parasites is at least partially responsible for these declines. It seems that low doses of one drug in particular, Ivermectin, pass unchanged through the animals, and are then ingested by the beetles, seriously hindering their ability to reproduce. This is a real problem, given how important these poo patrolling arthropods are for their ecosystems. A Spanish study in 2015 found that in fields frequented by animals dosed with these medications, dung decomposed 30% slower than in fields frequented by un-dosed animals, translating to 800 pounds of plop per acre per year that isn’t getting buried by beetles.

Take a look at this spot-the-difference game. Easy enough to solve, right?. But what if you were only shown one image at a time? Could you pick out all the differences? And what if getting home and feeding your family depended on it? Welcome to the life of a dung beetle. Recent research from Lund University in Sweden has shown that when beetles climb up on their ball and do a little dance, what they are doing is actually taking a mental snapshot of the sky to find their way home. Scientists say this is significant because while many animals use the stars to navigate, beetles are the only ones we know of who take a mental snapshot of the firmament and then compare their memory of it to the current position of the stars. Pretty impressive for a bug that eats shit for a living.

Eat or drink enough of anything and you’ll develop a nose for it, I guess. Research from the Entomological Society of America involving 9000 dung beetles across 15 species has determined a few things in regards to dung beetles’ refined palates, in what must have been the worst taste test in history. First, beetles prefer omnivore dung to herbivore dung, because the former is more odiferous. Human and chimpanzee crap were their favorites. What was really surprising though was that they preferred to feast on the droppings of animals they aren’t used to. For instance, one species that coevolved with bison eschewed that familiar bouquet in favor of imported moose, zebra, and waterbuck turds. So next time you’re trying to feed some bratty kid who won’t eat anything but grilled cheese sandwiches with no crust, tell him that even dung beetles like to try new things. And then offer him some monkey poop.


So, do you have a newfound respect for dung beetles? And how many synonyms for feces did you count in this video? For more soil-building top 10s and gourmet road apple top 5s published every day, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.