Dung Beetle

Dung beetles feed on feces. These are the species whose larvae feed on dung, especially a scarab (scarab is well-known for rolling around manure balls as part of an elaborate mating ritual). 

The larger species of these bury dung 250 times their own mass in a hole in one night before the eggs are laid, and some of them are known as rollers, meaning they roll the dung into round balls. 

There is another variety of species known as tunnelers, they bury the dung wherever they find it. 

However, there is an additional group, the dwellers, who don’t roll or borrow: they simply live in dung. Also, they are frequently attracted by the dung gathered by burrowing owls. 

The dung beetle species have various colours and sizes, and functional traits such as body mass (i.e., biomass) and leg length that can have high levels of variability, which we will understand along with the dung beetle classification.

Dung Beetle Classification

Dung Beetle Taxonomy

What are Dung Beetles?

All the dung beetle species belong to the superfamily of  Scarabaeoidea. Scarabaeoidea is a superfamily of beetles, belonging to the subgroup of the infraorder Scarabaeiformia. 

The greater part of these species belongs to the subfamilies Scarabaeinae and Aphodiinae of the family Scarabaeidae (scarab bugs). Like most types of Scarabaeinae feed only on defecation, that subfamily is frequently dubbed true dung beetles. 

Around 35,000 species are put in this superfamily and nearly 200 new species are portrayed every year. Its constituent families are likewise going through modification as of now, and the family list underneath is just fundamental.

Furthermore, Geotrupidae is another family of dung beetles that are dung-feeding beetles, also, they are known as the earth-boring dung beetle.

Besides this, the Scarabaeinae alone includes in excess of 5,000 species. 

The night owl (nocturnal) African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus is one of a few known non-vertebrate animals that explore and situate themselves utilizing the Milky Way.

Dung Beetle Evolution

In the year 1991, Cambefort and Hanski classified dung beetles into three following functional types based on their feeding and nesting strategies: 

• Rollers

• Tunnelers 

• Dwellers. 

The "rollers" roll the dug like a ball and bury it either for food storage or for making a brooding ball. In the second case, two beetles, one male, and one female stay around the dung ball during the rolling process. 

Generally, the male rolls the ball, while the female hitch-hikes (simply follows behind). However in some cases, the male and the female roll together. 

So, when they find soil with a soft spot, they stop and bury the ball, then mate underground. After the mating, either of them prepares the brooding ball. At the point, when the ball is done, the female lays eggs inside it, a type of mass provisioning.

Some of the species prefer to stay in this stage in order to safeguard their offspring. The dung beetle goes through a cycle of metamorphosis. The larvae reside in brood balls made with dung prepared by their parents. During the larval stage, the beetle feeds on the dung encompassing it.

Dung Beetle Behaviour

In the 18th Century, a French naturalist, entomologist, and author is known for the lively style of his popular books on the lives of insects, Jean-Henri Fabre could poorly study the behaviour of the beetles.

Further, Fabre corrected the myth that a dung beetle would take help from other dung beetles when opposed by obstacles. By experiment and observation, he found the seeming helpers were, in fact, anticipating an opportunity to steal the roller's food source.

Dung Beetle Habitat

Dung Beetles Live in Numerous Habitats, Including the Following:

• The desert

• Grasslands

• Savannas

• Farmlands, and 

• Native and planted forests.

They get easily affected by the environmental context and prefer to stay in normal cold or dry weather conditions, meaning they can’t bear extremely cold or hot temperatures.

You can find these species on all continents except Antarctica. Though they eat the dung of both herbivores and omnivores but prefer to eat that produced by the latter.

However, many of them also feed on mushrooms and decaying leaves and fruits. 

There is a type of dung beetle species that lives in Central America, Deltochilum valgum, which is a carnivore preying upon millipedes. 

Additionally, dung beetles do not have to eat or drink anything else, because the dung provides all the required nutrients.

Dung Beetle Significance

Dung beetles are significantly utilized in biological exploration as a decent bioindicator gathering to look at the effects of environmental aggravations, like extreme droughts and associated fires, and human exercises on tropical biodiversity and biological system working, for example, seed dispersal, soil bioturbation, and supplement cycling.

Dung Beetle Uses

Dung beetle assumes a part in horticulture and tropical forests. By covering and devouring waste, they improve nutrient recycling and soil structure. 

Further, dung beetles have additionally appeared to improve soil conditions and plant development in restored coal mine shafts in South Africa. 

• They are additionally significant for the dispersal of seeds present in animal dung affecting seed burial and seedling recruitment in tropical forests. They can protect livestock, like dairy cattle, by eliminating the dung which, assuming left, could give territory to pests like flies. Thus, numerous nations have presented animals to support animal husbandry. The American Institute of Biological Sciences reports that dung beetles save the United States cows industry and expected the US $380 million every year through covering over ground animals dung. 

• In Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) dispatched the Australian Dung Beetle Project (1965–1985) which, driven by George Bornemissza, tried to present types of dung beetles from South Africa and Europe. The effective presentation of 23 species was made, most strikingly Digitonthophagus Gazella and Euoniticellus intermedius, which has brought about the progress of the quality and richness of Australian dairy cattle pastures, alongside a decrease in the number of inhabitants in pestilent Australian bramble fly by around 90%. 

• An application has been made via Landcare Research to import up to 11 dung beetle species into New Zealand. As well as improving field soils the Dung Beetle Release Strategy Group says that it would bring about a decrease in outflows of nitrous oxide (an ozone harming substance) from agriculture.

• The African dung beetle (D. Gazella) was present in a few areas in North and South America and has been spreading its appropriation to different locales by normal dispersal and accidental transportation, and is currently likely naturalized in many nations among México and Argentina. 

Dung Beetle Benefits

• The colorful species may be valuable for controlling illnesses of animals in business regions, and might dislodge local species in altered scenes; nonetheless, information isn't decisive about its impact on local species in indigenous habitats and further checking is required. 

• In the same way as other different dung beetles, (dried) fertilizer insects, called qiāngláng in Chinese, are utilized in Chinese natural medication. It is recorded in the "insect section" of the Compendium of Materia Medica, where it is suggested for the fix of 10 diseases.

• In Isan, Northeastern Thailand, the nearby individuals broadly eat a wide range of sorts of insects, including the dung beetle. 

• The Mediterranean dung beetle (Bubas bison) has been utilized related to biochar stock grub to decrease discharges of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, which are both ozone-depleting gases. The beetles work the biochar-improved fertilizer into the dirt without the utilization of machines.

Dung Beetle Dangers

There is, in any case, strong opposition from some at the University of Auckland, and a couple of others, in light of the dangers of the dung beetles going about as vectors of infection. There are general wellbeing specialists at the University of Auckland who concur with the current EPA hazard assessment and without a doubt, there are a few Landcare programs in Australia that include schoolchildren gathering dung beetles.

How Do Dung Beetles Build Nests?

From the above text, we understand that dung beetles make balls of dung from the dung pat to construct a “brood mass”. Then they lay eggs inside the brood masses. 

Dung beetles are divided into the following three groups based on the way they collect and stock the brood mass:

• Teleocoprids or Rollers: The beetle creates a sphere from the dung pat/pellets and rolls it away with the help of its hind legs, then buries it in the soil and lays one egg.

• Paracoprids or Tunnellers: The beetle digs a tunnel at the bottom of the dung pellet and breaks bits of it with its head, front legs, and body, and takes it via the tunnel where it piles it up to end to form a compacted brood mass. Once egg is laid inside the brood mass, the beetles place a layer of soil on the brood mass before initiating the next one.

• Endocorpids or Dwellers: They build brood masses in cavities of the dung pat by themselves.

Dung Beetle Cultural Significance

Some dung beetles are utilized as food in South East Asia and an assortment of dung beetle species have been utilized therapeutically (are as yet being utilized in generally living social orders) in elixirs and society drugs to treat various ailments and issues. 

In Aesop's tale "The Eagle and the Beetle", the eagle murders a hare that has requested safe haven with a dung beetle. The beetle then, at that point, renders retribution by twice annihilating the eagle's eggs. 

The eagle, despondently, flies up to Olympus and spots her most recent eggs in Zeus' lap, importuning the god to protect them. At the point when the beetle discovers what the hawk has done, it stuffs itself with fertilizer, goes straight up to Zeus, and flies directly into his face. 

Zeus is frightened at seeing the terrible animal, leaping to his feet so the eggs are broken. Learning of the beginning of their fight, Zeus endeavors to intervene and, when his endeavors to intercede fizzle, he changes the rearing period of the bird to when the insects are not over the ground. 

Aristophanes insinuated Aesop's tale a few times in his plays. In Peace, the saint rides up to Olympus to liberate the goddess Peace from her jail. His horse is a tremendous waste insect that has been taken care of with such an excess of compost that it has developed to massive size. 

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Dung Beetle" recounts the account of a dung beetle who lives in the stable of the ruler's ponies in a fanciful realm. 

At the point when he requests brilliant shoes like those the ruler's pony wears and is rejected, he takes off and has a progression of undertakings, which are frequently encouraged by his sensation of prevalence over different creatures. He at last re-visits the stable having ruled (to everyone's surprise) that it is for him that the ruler's pony wears brilliant shoes.

In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, the changed character of Gregor Samsa is called an "old compost insect" (modify Mistkäfer) by a charwoman.

Do You Know?

There is an Isan tune กุดจี่หายไปใหน "Where Did the Dung Beetle Go", which relates the supplanting of water wild ox with the "metal" bison, which doesn't give the fertilizer expected to the manure insect and has prompted the expanding uncommonness of the compost scarab in the rural region.

The dung beetle weight (dung beetle -  Onthophagus Taurus) was found to be able to carry a weight 1,141 times its own body weight, which is equal to a 70 kg (or 150-pound) person lifting six full double-decker buses.