December 30, 2014 • 28 mins
Find out how and why dung beetles have been capitalizing on poop in a big way for 30 million years. Also, these little guys may be the world's tiniest astronomers. Robert and Julie reveal why.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
this week we were talking about a very ancient creature,
a creature that's that's potent with symbolism and power, and
then when you get down and analyze its biology, it's
(00:25):
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
(00:47):
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.
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:56):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:01):
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,
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:06):
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
(05:29):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:36):
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
(06:57):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:23):
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,
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:01):
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
(11:24):
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
(11:46):
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
(12:06):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:50):
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,
(13:10):
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,
(13:31):
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
(13:53):
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.
(14:15):
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,
(14:36):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:22):
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,
(15:43):
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,
(16:05):
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
(16:28):
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
(16:49):
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
(17:11):
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.
(17:33):
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
(17:54):
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
(18:15):
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
(18:36):
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
(18:58):
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
(19:18):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:02):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:44):
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,
(21:04):
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
(21:26):
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
(21:47):
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,
(22:09):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:53):
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
(23:14):
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,
(23:35):
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
(23:58):
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,
(24:19):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:29):
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
(25:51):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:34):
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
(26:55):
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
(27:17):
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
(27:40):
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(28:00):
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(28:21):
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
this week we were talking about a very ancient creature,
a creature that's that's potent with symbolism and power, and
then when you get down and analyze its biology, it's
(00:25):
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
(00:47):
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.
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:56):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:01):
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,
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:06):
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
(05:29):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:36):
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
(06:57):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:23):
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,
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:01):
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
(11:24):
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
(11:46):
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
(12:06):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:50):
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,
(13:10):
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,
(13:31):
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
(13:53):
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.
(14:15):
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,
(14:36):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:22):
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,
(15:43):
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,
(16:05):
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
(16:28):
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
(16:49):
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
(17:11):
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.
(17:33):
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
(17:54):
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
(18:15):
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
(18:36):
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
(18:58):
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
(19:18):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:02):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:44):
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,
(21:04):
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
(21:26):
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
(21:47):
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,
(22:09):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:53):
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
(23:14):
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,
(23:35):
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
(23:58):
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,
(24:19):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:29):
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
(25:51):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:34):
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
(26:55):
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
(27:17):
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
(27:40):
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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(28:00):
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(28:21):
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!