Cute, isnt he!! I see these guys a lot on my walks. They are sometimes referred to as Scarab Beetles. Guess what they eat ... yup, they eat dung. That sounds pretty disgusting but they are doing a great service by clearing up this animal waste. There are loads of different dung beetles all over the world. Many live in and eat the stuff and are known as dwellers, some bury the dung where they find it (the tunnellers) and some take the dung to a burrow. These chaps are called 'rollers' as they roll the dung to their homes. Nice. I guess you could say its extreme recycling!
One really interesting fact is that they navigate using The Milky Way. Apparently they are the only creature other than humans that do this. See theses links for more info
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Dung_beetle
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21150721
Yuck! That is gross.... funny enough I'm just writing a creepy crawly blog post too right now. No sign of any dung beetles here though thank goodness
ReplyDeletegotta thank them for doin a good job of clearing the earth of poo though! :)
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