Left to its own devices, nature is very good at recycling. Nothing is ever wasted. Everything can be used again and can be ...

Anyone who has walked through a barn or cattle pasture in the summer knows that flies are a nuisance and even a health hazard ...

Beetles eat dung, flies lay eggs, other insects come to eat the larvae of these animals. It’s a beautiful stinky circle of life.

They are dodgy little bugs and able to scurry undercover in a hurry. While some bugs, like the dung beetle, were there to eat dung, others were there to tunnel through in search of larvae to eat.

Dung beetles are found on every continent except Antarctica, in forests, grasslands, prairies, and deserts. And now, like many other species, they are coping with the effects of climate change.

Dung beetles are found on every continent except Antarctica, in forests, grasslands, prairies and deserts. And now, like many other species, they are coping with the effects of climate change.

Dung beetles (Onthophagus taurus) transfer beneficial microbes to larval offspring in chambers called brood balls, which are composed of herbivore dung and consumed by larvae; the microbes help ...

Spider dung beetles: coordinated cooperative transport without a predefined destination. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2024; 291 (2015) DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2023.2621 ...

The presence of dung beetles has also been shown to reduce the prevalence of cattle nematode infections by 55 to 89% (Fincher 1975) and pest flies by 58% (Benyon et al. 2015).

Dung beetle larvae develop inside a ball of dung, where they eat the inner walls, digest the dung and defecate the remains back onto the wall, to be eaten again.

MCCULLOUGH: So this is the beetle room. It takes a special kind of person to sign up to work in a dung beetle lab. (LAUGHTER) DANIEL: One of those special people is undergrad Beatrice Altopp.

An egg is visible in the center of a brood ball from a female rainbow scarab beetle (Phanaeus vindex). Kimberly Sheldon, CC BY-ND When the egg hatches, the larva feeds on dung from the brood ball ...