- [Narrator] Long hind legs are perfect
for guiding the ball.
The shorter front ones are powerful pushing levers,
shifting 10 times the beetle's weight.
- That was a clip from BBC Earth,
narrated by David Attenborough
on the plight of the humble dung beetle.
- Let's find out how poop has kept this species
going strong for 30 million years.
(laser sound)
(liquid drop)
(techno music)
- [Woman] So why exactly are beetles
hoarding globes of excrement?
- [Man] The first reason is sustenance.
Excrement, though a waste product,
contains nutrients and water content,
and in dung beetle-ville, that's a well-rounded meal.
In fact, the majority of their diet is feces,
although they sometimes nosh on carrion,
leaf litter, mushrooms and decaying fruit.
- [Woman] The other reason is
that it makes a perfect baby crib.
According to the San Diego Zoo,
after a chance encounter at a dung pat,
male and female rollers establish a pair bond.
The male offers the female a giant sized brood ball.
If she accepts,
the two beetles ride off into the sunset together,
and then they find a safe place for their dung ball.
- Then the female deposits eggs,
and the resulting larvae eat their way through the ball,
emerging in their final form,
with a pair of wings and six legs,
two of which are incredibly strong
and help to roll their future dung ball meals.
- But dung beetles won't dine on just any old piece of scat.
They tend to prefer excrement from omnivores.
Wyatt Hoback,
a professor of the University of Nebraska, Kearny,
studied 9,000 dung beetles of 15 different species.
He found that the smellier the poop,
which generally came from omnivores,
like humans and chimpanzees,
well, the more prized it was.
- And not all dung beetles
are into exotic dining options, either.
In 1778, in Australia,
when cows and other large livestock
not indigenous to Australia were imported,
dung beetles turned up their noses at the new excrement.
Which meant here was a huge infestation
of flies and other parasites,
and beetles who fed on cow dung had to be imported.
- But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of a dung beetle
is its navigation abilities.
Imagine if you were a beetle,
and before you,
a gloriously large pile of poop plopped down.
If you were the Onthophagus taurus,
it'd be no problem to shape and the push it
up to 656 feet or 200 meters away.
- That's because this species can pull
1,141 times its own body weight,
the equivalent of an average person pulling
six double-decker buses full of people.
- And navigating that dung ball would be a breeze
because it turns out that dung beetles
use the sky to travel in a completely straight line.
In the paper by Deck, et al, quote,
"Dung beetles use the Milky Way for orientation."
Researches documented how they covered the dorsal,
or top eyes, of some beetles
with tiny little hats.
- When the be-hatted beetles couldn't see the sky,
as in one experiment,
or they couldn't see the lights in a planetarium,
as in another experiment,
they walked around in circles.
So they couldn't orient themselves to the moon
or the Milky Way,
and they were essentially lost.
- Moreover, beetles occasionally climb atop their dung balls
and do what looks like a little jig.
They're not actually dancing,
but cooling off,
and sometimes using their elevated position
as a lookout for would-be competitors.
- And that competition can be fierce.
In Dr. John Capanera's book, "Insects and Wildlife,"
he detailed how 16,000 beetles
clamored over a 1.5 kilogram, or 3.3 pound
load of elephant dung,
dismantling it and carrying it away in just two hours.
- Competition can be why
one species of dung beetle sprouted horns.
Nikola Watson and Leah Simmons
of the University of Western Australia, Perth,
pitted female dung beetles, Onthophagus sagittarius,
against each other in a race for animal feces.
They found that the females with larger horns
collected more excrement,
giving them the competitive edge.
- So to recap,
dung beetles are robust, tiny astronomers
who navigate by the stars with laser-like focus
as they concentrate on their one mission in life:
to collect, roll, and eat poop.
Oh, and ancient Egyptians worshiped them.
A lot.
We both know you're gonna watch more videos, so,
why not these three?
- Yeah. - Right here.
- Do it to it. - Right here.
- Enter the paranoid, delusional,
and outright depressing world of space madness.
Hey, Robert.
- Hey.
- I was thinking,
for the next podcast episode,
what about seed pods?
(groans)
(laughs)
- We humans have a tendency
to misunderstand the Cenobite,
casting them as some sort of hellish torture
in a Christian moral universe.
(peaceful chords)