If the TV series Dirty Jobs covered animals as well as humans, it would probably start with dung beetles. These hardworking critters are among the insect world’s most important recyclers. They eat and ...

On an unseasonably warm fall morning in early November, Erin McCullough strides through Hadwen Arboretum — a small patch of woodland in Worcester in central Massachusetts. We walk through swirls of ...

Locating and Working on a Dung Pat Most dung beetles are looking for the manure of herbivores because they excrete a lot of undigested food in their poop. It’s basically a pile of undigested grass and ...

Dung beetles play a pivotal role in sustaining ecosystem processes through nutrient recycling, soil aeration, and plant growth enhancement. Their diverse ecology encompasses a wide range of functional ...

Placed over the heart in the wrappings of Egyptian mummies, archaeologists have often found carved amulets of scarab beetles, a species of dung beetle. The amulets, many with spells inscribed on them, ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This article was originally featured on The Conversation. If the TV ...

This paper reviews the current knowledge of perching behaviour in dung beetles, and records for the first time perching behaviour in three species of Onthophagus Latreille dung beetles in lowland ...

In order to examine the degree of resource selectivity in a north temperate dung beetle assemblage and to identify major parameters that influence such selectivity, the occurrence of adult dung ...

When Cristina Ledón-Rettig first noticed worms in the little balls of poop, she thought something had gone wrong. Ledón-Rettig studies dung beetles, and she breeds one species—the taurus scarab—in her ...

Analysing DNA inside the guts of dung beetles could provide a useful way to monitor endangered lemur populations in Madagascar. Sergei Tarasov at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki and ...

ECOSYSTEMS ARE complex things, and monitoring their health is hard. To track every species would be impossible, so ecologists commonly focus on those that, like canaries in coal mines, are thought to ...

Creating a census of the dung beetles of Massachusetts gives clues into the health of forests and fields. Searching for tiny dung beetles that clean the vast forest floor On an unseasonably warm fall ...