40 Fun Facts About Dung Beetles

Which feature of the night sky did planetarium tests show dung beetles use to roll their balls in straight lines?

The Milky Way alone was enough: beetles in a Johannesburg planetarium held a straight course when only its faint band was shown. Vertebrates such as birds were known to steer this way, but no insect had been.

Which Egyptian god of the rising sun was pictured as a man with a scarab dung beetle for a head?

Khepri was believed to push the sun into the morning sky just as a scarab pushes a ball of dung along the ground. Egyptians wore beetle amulets as protective charms.

Relative to its size, the horned dung beetle Onthophagus taurus is considered which of these among all known animals?

The strongest title comes from a male pulling 1,141 times its own body weight, like a person hauling six double-decker buses full of people.

Dung beetles thrive from deserts to forests on every continent except which one?

Antarctica is the one gap because dung beetles avoid extremely cold or dry weather. Everywhere else they work deserts, grasslands, farmland and forests.

Australia's native dung beetles evolved to bury the small, dry pellets of which animals, leaving cow pats untouched?

Kangaroos and other marsupials leave hard, fibrous pellets, so native beetles ignored the soft pads of imported cattle, which then lay on the pasture for months or even years.

Which small American owl scatters mammal dung around its home as bait to attract dung beetles for food?

The burrowing owl lines the entrance of its underground nest with dung, usually from cattle, then picks off the beetles that come to investigate.

Ancient Egyptians buried their dead with a dung beetle amulet whose spell told which organ not to testify against them?

The heart was weighed against a feather when the dead were judged, so a stone scarab hung at the neck carried a Book of the Dead spell binding it to silence.

Which author's novella The Metamorphosis has a cleaning lady call the transformed Gregor Samsa an old dung beetle?

Franz Kafka's narrator calls Gregor only a monstrous vermin, and Vladimir Nabokov, a butterfly expert as well as a novelist, concluded he was simply a big winged beetle.

Which adventure film recasts Egypt's sacred dung beetles as flesh-eating scarabs buried alive with the priest Imhotep?

The Mummy animated its swarms with techniques developed for Star Wars: Episode I, though real sacred scarabs feed only on dung.

A genus of long-legged, ball-rolling dung beetles is named after which figure from Greek mythology?

Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity, a fitting namesake for more than 90 species that spend their lives rolling balls of dung.

Scientists sort dung beetles into rollers, tunnelers and which third group that neither rolls nor digs?

Dwellers simply live inside the dung pat, laying their eggs and raising their young right where it fell.

In Aesop's fable, a dung beetle takes revenge on which bird by rolling the eggs out of its nest?

An eagle is the beetle's enemy, and it finally hides its eggs in the lap of Zeus; in one version the beetle rolls a ball of dung onto the god, who leaps up and lets them fall.

South Africa's flightless dung beetle survives mainly in a national park named after which animal?

The elephant gives Addo Elephant National Park its name and the beetle much of its food; having lost the power of flight, the insect must walk from one dung pile to the next.

Most dung beetles track down a fresh pile using mainly which sense, aided by antennae that fan out like leaves?

Smell is so sharp that a beetle can catch a whiff of dung on the air; some small species skip the search and simply cling to the animal and wait.

What are the pale, C-shaped larvae of dung beetles and other scarabs called as they feed inside a brood ball?

Grubs hatch inside a ball of dung their parents buried and eat their way through it, hidden underground from sunlight and predators.

Between larva and adult, a dung beetle passes through which resting stage inside its buried brood ball?

Pupa is the last stage before adulthood in the beetle's complete metamorphosis; the new adult then digs its way out and goes in search of fresh dung.

Which part of a fresh cow pat do adult dung beetles actually feed on, making dried-out dung useless to them?

The liquid is a soup full of microorganisms, and some dung beetles have mouthparts built to suck it out from between the half-digested grass.

Dung beetles imported to Australia cut the numbers of which pest by around 90%?

Bush flies, the insects behind the gesture known as the Aussie salute, breed in dung pads, so beetles that bury a pad quickly leave them nowhere to lay eggs.

Dung beetles share the scarab family Scarabaeidae with giant horned beetles named after which animal?

The rhinoceros beetles also share the family with June beetles and Japanese beetles, while stag beetles, for all their similar looks, sit in a family of their own.

A female sacred scarab dung beetle sculpts her underground brood ball into the shape of which fruit?

A pear shape leaves a hollow in the narrow neck for a single large egg. A successful female raises only about half a dozen young in her whole life.

In which Aristophanes comedy about ending a war does the hero ride a giant dung beetle up to the gods?

Peace has the Athenian Trygaeus feed his beetle on dung and ride it to heaven, a parody of Euripides' play Bellerophon.

Which French naturalist showed that dung beetles seeming to help a roller were really waiting to steal its ball?

Jean-Henri Fabre, whom Charles Darwin called an inimitable observer, overturned the old belief by patient watching and simple experiments in the late 19th century.

Which tongue-in-cheek science award went in 2013 to five researchers studying how dung beetles navigate at night?

The Ig Nobel Prize honours research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. The beetle team won in a joint astronomy and biology category.

The dung beetle Scarabaeus zambesianus was the first animal found to steer by polarized light from which source?

The Moon scatters a dim pattern of polarized light across the night sky, and a 2003 study in Nature showed the beetles use it to keep their course.

The rainforest dung beetle Deltochilum valgum has given up dung to hunt which prey, often far longer than itself?

Millipedes are gripped with its long, curved hind legs and bitten at a joint between body segments, which sometimes takes the head clean off.

The Iberian dung beetle Thorectes lusitanicus surprised researchers by preferring which tree nuts to dung?

Acorns are buried by this beetle much as others bury dung, and because it does not always finish them, it helps oak trees spread.

George Bornemissza urged Australia to import dung beetles after comparing its pastures with those of which homeland?

Hungary's fields were kept clean by dung beetles, while the Australian paddocks he saw in 1951 were strewn with old, dry cow pats. He went on to conceive and lead the Australian Dung Beetle Project.

What name is given to the hardened front wings that cover a dung beetle's flight wings like a case?

Elytra swing open so that most dung beetles can take to the air, some travelling several miles to reach a fresh pat.

Ball-rolling dung beetles of the American genus Canthon are popularly known by which playful name?

Tumblebugs range from North to South America, and the nickname is also used loosely for ball-rolling dung beetles in general.

Which mythical monster gives its name to Typhaeus typhoeus, a dung beetle whose males bear three horn-like prongs?

The Minotaur beetle lives in sandy parts of Europe and North Africa, and its scientific name honours a second terror of Greek myth, the giant Typhon.

Dung beetles, like every other beetle, belong to which insect order, the largest order in the animal kingdom?

Coleoptera holds about 400,000 described species, roughly a quarter of all known animal species.

Dor beetles form the dung beetle family Geotrupidae, whose name comes from Greek words with which meaning?

Earth borer fits a family whose nest tunnels can run more than two metres deep in some species.

While a male dung beetle rolls a brood ball away, what does the female often do?

The female often rides on top of it or simply follows behind. Once the pair reach soft soil they bury the ball and mate underground.

Hornless minor males of the dung beetle Onthophagus taurus win mates from horned guards by using which tactic?

Sneaking past them works because long horns make a guarding male clumsy inside tunnels; the small males also grow larger testes to improve their odds.

Egyptians thought scarab dung beetles bred without females, like which creator god who begat children alone?

Atum made a neat parallel because Egyptians saw young beetles emerge from a buried dung ball and wrongly inferred the male had fathered them by himself.

Most ancient Egyptian amulets shaped like scarab dung beetles were carved from which soft stone that hardens when fired?

Steatite, also known as soapstone, was usually glazed blue or green, though the colour has often weathered away to leave the scarabs white or brown.

Egyptian carvings of scarab dung beetles had flat inscribed bases so that officials could use them as what?

Seals shaped like scarabs largely replaced Egypt's older cylinder seals, and so many were made that excavators find them all around the Mediterranean.

Which country approved importing up to 11 dung beetle species in 2011, partly to cut greenhouse gas from pastures?

New Zealand's plan drew strong opposition from some University of Auckland scientists, who feared the beetles might spread disease.

By burying dung, dung beetles help tropical forests regrow because they also plant what is hidden in the droppings?

Seeds pass through animals into their dung, so beetles that bury the dung bury them too and shape which seedlings take hold.

In Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Dung Beetle, the beetle demands which reward given to a royal horse?

Golden shoes are refused him, so the offended beetle storms off on a string of adventures and comes home convinced the horse wears them in his honour.