From sacred scarabs to Earth’s mightiest insect … Here are 14 amazing true facts about dung beetles!

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#9 Brooding Balls
When these Beetles roll their balls of dung for purposes of reproduction, the sphere is identified as a brooding ball. The male will usually roll the ball while the female follows behind or hitches a ride. There are some cases where both of them will roll the ball together. Once a soft spot in the soil is located, the ball is buried, and the two insects mate underground. Afterwards, the brooding ball is formed, and the female lays her eggs inside of it. Each egg is placed in a chamber provided with food for the brood … a type of parental behavior called ‘mass provisioning’.



#8 Dung Diet
Have you ever heard of ‘coprophagous insects’? Those are insects that survive on the excrement of other, larger animals. Dung beetles fall into that category, although they are particular about the feces that they consume. And while not all dung beetles have a diet made up exclusively of poop … they all consume feces at some point in their lives. The droppings of herbivores seem to be the most favored because it consists mostly of undigested plant material. As opposed to the leavings of carnivores, which contains little nutritional value for the dung beetles. Expert say that the insects might actually prefer the dropping of omnivores, which have nutritional value. and the odor makes them easy to locate.



#7 The Nose Knows
Maybe it should go without saying, but dung beetles are exceptionally talented at locating dung … and that is thanks to their sensitive sense of smell. And from the insect’s point of view, freshness counts. That’s because dung pies will lose their moistness and dry out fairly quickly … making it far less desirable to the palate. Experts have recounted stories where 4,000 beetles swarmed over some elephant poo less that 15 minutes after it was deposited. That initial swarm was joined by another 12,000 insects. That’s a lot of competition, so time is always of the essence where fresh dung is concerned. That also holds true for dung beetles that don’t follow their nose. These individuals will hitch a ride on the animals whose feces they covet. When the animal voids its bowels, the beetle will hop down and proceed to dig in. For the record, these critters don’t have noses … they actually ‘smell’ with their antennae.




#6 Old School Style
These critters are thought to have evolved more than 60 million years ago, although we found some sources claiming they were even older. Let’s agree that dung beetles have been around for quite some time. And way back in the prehistoric day, they were serving much the same function as today. Except that they were feasting on the dung of truly massive animals like Glyptodon, a huge armadillo-like critter about the size of a small car … and giant ground sloths like Megatherium, which could weigh up to 4 tons and measure some 20 feet long. Paleontologists have found dung balls as large as tennis balls that date back tens of millions of years. That must have made for some monster clean-up duty.




#5 Fussy Eaters
When it comes to excrement, not just any poo will do. Dung beetles can effectively specialize in eating the droppings of certain types of animals, while ignoring the leavings of other types. An extreme example of this occurred in Australia in the 1960s. Dung beetles indigenous to Oz had evolved alongside marsupials likes kangaroos and wombats, and had developed an affinity for those droppings. When cattle was introduced Down Under in the late 19th century, the majority of native beetles ignored the bovine waste. As a result, the cow pats (or patties, or cow pies for that matter) began to pile up in the Outback, where it could take months, or even years to decompose. As pastures became rank, cows wouldn’t feed there, and the dung provided breeding ground for parasitic worms and pestilent worms. Eventually, species of foreign dung beetles with a taste for bovine excrement were imported to Australia. Over time, the polluting effects of cow waste were steadily reversed. Today, the pastureland is in much better shape, and fly populations have had their wings clipped.

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