![]() “The last place they’d want to end up is back at the dung pile with all the others, so they’ll roll in a straight line in any direction, as fast as they can.”Īlso read: More Fun Than Fun: Dung Beetles, the Milky Way and the Marvels of Animal Navigationīut travelling in a straight line is surprisingly difficult. “In South Africa, elephant dung is just alive with dung beetles - you can find hundreds or even thousands of dung beetles in a dung pile, and they’ll happily smash each other up to steal a ball,” says neuroethologist Eric Warrant at Lund University. To keep their cargo from getting stolen by rivals, ball rollers have evolved to escape from dung piles in the fastest, most efficient way possible - a straight line, as the scientists describe in an article in the Annual Review of Entomology. (Many more species don’t roll balls, but stow dung away in long tunnels burrowed directly under dung pats.) Roughly 600 of the 8,000-plus known dung beetle species roll such balls, scurrying away from mounds of animal dung with spheres of excrement for about six minutes before they bury the balls, along with themselves, so they can dine underground in peace. “Tiny brains can solve fantastic tasks,” says neurobiologist Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden, one of a small cadre of researchers who have worked for years, often as a team, to piece together the tricks the insects use to roll balls in their eerily straight lines. With a life devoted to excrement but guided by the heavens, dung beetles might embody the famed Oscar Wilde quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” And so does light from the moon, and from the distant stars of the Milky Way. In fact, it’s the sun that steers the movement of dung beetles. The ancient Egyptians also believed that a dung beetle drove the movement of the sun, because the sacred scarab ( Scarabaeus sacer) - which sculpts dung into balls for meals, gifts for potential mates or repositories for eggs - rolls the balls across the ground in a manner that reflects the sun’s journey across the sky. The amulets, many with spells inscribed on them, were intended to help the dead in a final judgment by the jackal-headed god of death, Anubis, who would weigh the hearts of the deceased to assess whether they were worthy of the afterlife. ![]() Placed over the heart in the wrappings of Egyptian mummies, archaeologists have often found carved amulets of scarab beetles, a species of dung beetle. ![]()
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