Scarabaeidae | Dirty guys

You would wake up at early midnight look around and go in search for the deadliest you can smell or rather pleasant for you and find a big clay like chunk pile and you tear a piece and shape it into a ball roll it with your hind legs and walk on your forelimbs and bury it into your home. That chunky thing would be poop and you would be a dung beetle (Scarabaeus Satyrus ). Not all dung beetles are active at night. 

These beetles are so distinct and unique that they deserve a whole blog (of mine) even when we exclude the fact that they eat and lay eggs in poop of others animals. An average poop of an animal in the wild ( I don't know if average changes much by the way ) attracts around 4000 beetle in just a quarter of an hour. The first task of these beetles is to find a steaming fresh warm turd ( some species just hang out by the hair of others animals waiting until they poop ) and shape it into balls because there is a tough competition. Some even directly lay eggs and leave the pit, this is a bit vulnerable and risky option but easy to achieve, at least some are clean and clever. These bugs seemed to be more useful than dirty that burying of the poop is so efficient in germinating seeds that a plant species called "Restiads" ( Ceratocaryum argentenum ) adapted to a new mechanism of having their seeds look like poop balls and smell like them too. These are found mostly in  places where others animals live and poop. Places like dense rainforests and pasture grasslands, either habitats pose a difficult challenge to the beetles and that is grass !! 

Grass for us is always below knee or at most knee height but for them it is like a forest. So beetles navigate themselves by looking at the sun's position and determine time and direction and the nocturnal beetles look at the milky way band and stars for directions and time !!!

Beetles roll up to 250x times it own body weight in a single night.

A dung beetle in a bar 

"Is this stool taken ?"

Comment below for any suggestion, stay tuned for next blog 😊👍😃.

Maanavendra roy,
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