Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: this week we were talking about a very ancient creature,
Speaker 1: a creature that's that's potent with symbolism and power, and
Speaker 1: then when you get down and analyze its biology, it's
Speaker 1: it's even more amazing. And yet somehow I have had
Speaker 1: a terrible habit of not really giving these animals a
Speaker 1: second glance um or any kind of a deeper look
Speaker 1: in all my time just reading about stuff I know.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they are potent with symbolism, and they're potent
Speaker 1: with pooh in they turn to be really interesting little
Speaker 1: characters who are doing a number of clever things with feces. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're of course talking about dung beetles. And really, I mean,
Speaker 1: you can take any lead in you want with these animals.
Speaker 1: You're you into mummies, you into Egyptology, Dune beat? Are
Speaker 1: you into poop and poop related science? Du I mean
Speaker 1: that covers I think at least of the listeners right there.
Speaker 1: If you're if you're not into mummies, then you're into
Speaker 1: poop one of the two. Oh yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: the subset of this would be like you into dancing
Speaker 1: on your poop beetles, Yeah, you into or maybe you
Speaker 1: want a space angle. There's a space angle coming up too.
Speaker 1: I mean, dung beetles really have it all. And and
Speaker 1: I feel bad for not really not really giving them a,
Speaker 1: you know, a second look this whole time, even though
Speaker 1: you know, I've definitely been fascinated by a various uh
Speaker 1: Egyptian topics in the past, and and you see the
Speaker 1: scare of beetle everywhere, and for some reason, I never thought, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe I should look into the symbolism of that scared beetle.
Speaker 1: I'm always more distracted by any of the other um
Speaker 1: items in the rich iconography. Yeah, ancient Egyptians they really
Speaker 1: exalted dung beetles because they witnessed them doing two things
Speaker 1: which really captive captivated ancient Egyptian imagination, and it overlaid
Speaker 1: this more sort of poetic interpretation. And of these two
Speaker 1: things that they saw these dung beetles doing, first they
Speaker 1: saw them rolling dung balls, right, and they were like,
Speaker 1: this is very interesting, and we've all seen video of this.
Speaker 1: It pops up in just about every animal documentary ever
Speaker 1: because it is it's fascinating and kind of humorous to
Speaker 1: watch them pedal it with their their phind legs. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And second, they observe these dung beetles dancing on top
Speaker 1: of it, and they thought, maybe this is a kind
Speaker 1: of worshiping of the sun. And then they put it
Speaker 1: together with huh, that that dung rolling could be linked
Speaker 1: with nocturnal activity of Capri, the god of the rising sun.
Speaker 1: So this scare beetle god was believed to push the
Speaker 1: setting sun along the sky in the same manner as
Speaker 1: the beatle with his ball of dung. Alright, so they
Speaker 1: saw a sort of a cosmic model and what the
Speaker 1: scare beetle is doing because he already had this this idea,
Speaker 1: the story of this god rolling the sun across the horizon. Right,
Speaker 1: they see these little guys doing it in miniature, and
Speaker 1: I think, ah, Yes. And moreover, unbeknownst to ancient Egyptians,
Speaker 1: larvae might be laying inside of some of those balls
Speaker 1: of dung. And what would happen as they would see
Speaker 1: this completely fully formed beetle emerged from the ball And
Speaker 1: they didn't realize that the larvae was undergoing a complete
Speaker 1: metamorphos within that ball. So again they were ascribing these
Speaker 1: sort of magical qualities to this beetle and saying, ah,
Speaker 1: this must be some sort of rebirth. So they sort
Speaker 1: of saw this kind of a spontaneous generation kind of
Speaker 1: scenario where the young were just emerging from the ball
Speaker 1: of dung. Yeah, and if they began to symbolize rebirth, yeah.
Speaker 1: And so this apparently becomes a prominent funerary decoration throughout
Speaker 1: the New Kingdom, which went from about the fifty to
Speaker 1: ten seventy b c. And during that time that you
Speaker 1: see all these scare amulets placed over the heart of
Speaker 1: a mummified the individual. The interesting thing about these heart
Speaker 1: scared is that they were essentially kind of a magical hack,
Speaker 1: like a spell, intended to just give you a little
Speaker 1: leg up in the afterlife. Because we've we've discussed before,
Speaker 1: I think we went into it in the problem of
Speaker 1: Hell that we're talking about various models of the afterlife. Um,
Speaker 1: the cosmology of ancient Egypt was was really rich, and
Speaker 1: they have this this really elaborate afterlife, and there's a
Speaker 1: judgment that takes place where your your your soul, your
Speaker 1: heart is weighed against the feather of truth. Now, you'd
Speaker 1: have to feel pretty sure about yourself to go into
Speaker 1: that that scenario and and and feel that you're gonna
Speaker 1: you're gonna triumph. And as you as we see in
Speaker 1: in all the various funerary and practices of ancient Egypt. Uh,
Speaker 1: those with the power to do so, we're all about
Speaker 1: preparing themselves because the afterlife is going to be dangerous,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be complex. You need your un your your servants,
Speaker 1: you need your goods, you need spells, you need all
Speaker 1: of these things. So you're gonna so you're gonna enter
Speaker 1: into your sarcophagus with his heart scared. That will serve
Speaker 1: to give you just a little bit of like a
Speaker 1: plus one or a plus two during that trial. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if your heart wasn't so pure, perhaps this talisman, this
Speaker 1: the scaub, would help to write things when your heart
Speaker 1: was weighed against this feather. Yeah, otherwise you're annihilated. There's
Speaker 1: no there's no even going to to hell. They're just
Speaker 1: you're just gone. Isn't there like a little animal next
Speaker 1: to or a little creature next to the scale that
Speaker 1: gobbles up the heart? If it if it's not a
Speaker 1: worthy one. Yeah, the crocodile headed uh I believe his
Speaker 1: name was I may have that wrong. My apologies to
Speaker 1: the crocodile headed devour of souls if that is the case.
Speaker 1: So all of that should give everybody a good idea
Speaker 1: of these humble dung beetles. And even though they have
Speaker 1: a rich past in ancient Egypt, to day we give
Speaker 1: them nary a thought. And we should because they have
Speaker 1: been rolling these dung balls for something like thirty million
Speaker 1: years and um, they have been astronomers in a sense,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to that in a moment, but they
Speaker 1: are pretty amazing. Let's look at some of their more
Speaker 1: physical attributes. Yeah, and I want to add that they're
Speaker 1: they're just about everywhere. You'll find dung beetles of one
Speaker 1: type or another on every continent except Antarctica because obviously
Speaker 1: they would have a tough time of it in Antarctica.
Speaker 1: And in their use of dung, they play a vital
Speaker 1: role in dealing with with our waste. They are they
Speaker 1: are very important UH species, So they're not just mere
Speaker 1: curios that just roll some dung around. They play an
Speaker 1: important role in UH in the environment. Yeah, we'll look
Speaker 1: at a specific example of that later too. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are more than five thousand species of dung beetles,
Speaker 1: and typical dung beetle appearance is a grooved shield, large
Speaker 1: strong front limbs for digging and fighting, and elongated back
Speaker 1: legs for holding onto dung balls while rolling them along.
Speaker 1: They've got some long flying wings that are folded there
Speaker 1: under hard wing covers. And some of the well known
Speaker 1: families in the dung beetle super family are the stag
Speaker 1: best and scab beetles. Uh. Their length can range from
Speaker 1: about point zero zero four inches to two point four
Speaker 1: inches and uh, they have six legs in total, usually
Speaker 1: brown in color, but some of them can be brightly colored. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of them are quite beautiful. In fact, the rainbow
Speaker 1: scarub actually has this this ter destined look to it,
Speaker 1: like a piece of jewelry. Yeah, they can be really
Speaker 1: gorgeous and very strong. The male Otho flags taurus can
Speaker 1: pull one thousand onety one times its own body weight.
Speaker 1: Now that is the equivalent of an average person pulling
Speaker 1: six double decker buses full of people. Who So these
Speaker 1: are powerful creatures, yeah, I mean compared to their size obviously.
Speaker 1: And another interesting fact is that they are committed parents.
Speaker 1: And this is rather surprising because when we when you
Speaker 1: think about the insect world, um, at least if you're
Speaker 1: like me, you tend to think of just um from
Speaker 1: a human perspective, almost like a cruel um, just heartless scenario.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's no such thing as insect politics, uh,
Speaker 1: to to quote Dr Brundle, But with these particular creatures,
Speaker 1: with the Dunge beagles, one or both of the parents
Speaker 1: stay with the larva until they are mature, which can
Speaker 1: take up to four months. And uh, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: quite unusual in the insect world. Yeah, almost. I mean
Speaker 1: you can get really like, you can really project some
Speaker 1: human nous onto this because it seems almost like a
Speaker 1: little courting thing here. This is from the San Diego Zoo.
Speaker 1: It says after a chance encounter at a dumb pet,
Speaker 1: male and female rollers established a pair bond. The male
Speaker 1: offers the female a giant sized brood ball of fiecies.
Speaker 1: If she accepts it, they roll it away together or
Speaker 1: the female rides on top of the ball. Well. They
Speaker 1: It is a refreshingly sweet relationship compared to a lot
Speaker 1: of other models of insect courtship. That come to mind
Speaker 1: where everyone's getting there their head chewed off, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, torn off, yeah, um, yeah, And they'll find
Speaker 1: a soft place to bury the ball before mating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then they'll care for it. It's not just a
Speaker 1: matter of just pumping your larva into the belly of
Speaker 1: some sort of a host creature. There. There's almost again
Speaker 1: to project kind of a family structure here. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: certain cephalodis miss dung beetles even made for life so beautiful. Now,
Speaker 1: I know what what everyone's thinking aboutre you're thinking. I know,
Speaker 1: I didn't come into an episode about dung beetles to
Speaker 1: hear about their family. I want to hear about the
Speaker 1: consumption of pooh. How does that work? How does that
Speaker 1: make sense? Right? Because it's a waste product to you
Speaker 1: might easily say, this is something that another animal has
Speaker 1: has sucked the life out of, and then this is
Speaker 1: the husk of that of that that consumption. So so
Speaker 1: what is there for a dung beetle to even consume? Well,
Speaker 1: quite a lot, just because it's just I mean what
Speaker 1: the important thing to take home here is that even
Speaker 1: though it is a waste product, not all of the
Speaker 1: nutrients are are missing, particularly when you look at herbi wars.
Speaker 1: I mean herbivar poop is going to be you know,
Speaker 1: consists mostly of undigestible vegetation, right, so you've got a
Speaker 1: lot of plant material there, and you have water content
Speaker 1: as well, which is going to be crucial in your
Speaker 1: dry environments. Now, most species subsist almost exclusively on the
Speaker 1: excrement of other organisms, though they can sometimes feast on carrion,
Speaker 1: leaf litter, mushrooms or decaying fruit. Right, never human flesh,
Speaker 1: just straight up carnivorous scared beetles. If you saw that
Speaker 1: in The Mummy the movie. Um, don't take that to
Speaker 1: the bank. Yeah. Um. They can have really specific appetites
Speaker 1: for poop, so you can't just assume that you put
Speaker 1: a big pile of poop in front of them and
Speaker 1: they'll just roll away with it and be happy with it.
Speaker 1: And in Australia in seventeen seventy eight they found this
Speaker 1: out the hard way, And the reason for that is
Speaker 1: that they had I wor did a bunch of cows
Speaker 1: and other large livestock that were not indigenous to the area,
Speaker 1: and they just these things are gonna poop everywhere, and
Speaker 1: they thought, well, the scare beetles, that the dung beetles
Speaker 1: will take care of this, right, sure, but this the
Speaker 1: dung beetles were like, no way, I don't know what
Speaker 1: this is. It doesn't smell right to me, and they
Speaker 1: basically turned their noses up at it. What happened is
Speaker 1: that in that part of Australia they had a huge
Speaker 1: infestation of flies and other parasites that moved in and
Speaker 1: said well, I'll take it, and they ended up having
Speaker 1: to import uh, dung beetles that would eat the exprement
Speaker 1: of these cows and other large livestock. Well, that's just
Speaker 1: another page from a familiar book. When we start messing
Speaker 1: around with the ecological structure. Uh, then things are out
Speaker 1: of whack. A little more cold rot water because the
Speaker 1: bath is too hot, a little more hot because it's
Speaker 1: too cold, and then the bath is overflowed. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: just one factory cascade. Indeed. Now they also they also
Speaker 1: sort of like a certain scent profile to their dung,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that has to do with the
Speaker 1: diet of the organism. Yeah, well they like it strong, correct,
Speaker 1: they do. In fact, many species of dung beetle prefer
Speaker 1: omnivore dung such as human dung or or your monkey dung.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh, and this is actually going to be
Speaker 1: more odorous dunk stinky, you're dune, Yeah, because it does
Speaker 1: have that plant material and has the meat, and it
Speaker 1: has all of the bacteria that is breaking it down
Speaker 1: and making it very smelly. But how do we know
Speaker 1: that they prefer it? Well, some very committed scientists, including
Speaker 1: researcher Why Hoback, a professor at the University of Nebraska
Speaker 1: A Kearney. They used these pitfall traps, large buckets buried
Speaker 1: in the ground, and it contained feces from a bunch
Speaker 1: of different species or a dead rotting rat in the
Speaker 1: bottom carrion, or the remains of dead animals can also
Speaker 1: serve as a food source for dung beetles, as we
Speaker 1: had said before, So the researchers wanted to compare this
Speaker 1: to the dung samples, and two summers of work in
Speaker 1: two thousand and ten two thousand eleven, the team captured
Speaker 1: more than nine thousand dung beetles of fifteen different species,
Speaker 1: and of the dung samples, human and chimpanzee feces, both
Speaker 1: omnivores here attracted the most dung beetles. The dead rat
Speaker 1: came in next, followed by pig droppings uh, then poop
Speaker 1: from the carnivorous species, which included uh lion and tiger dung,
Speaker 1: and then dead last herbivores, which again brings us back
Speaker 1: to the Australian UH example, where we had all this
Speaker 1: herbivore poop just setting around and the dungees were not
Speaker 1: the right dung beetles to eat it. And in essence,
Speaker 1: I guess you could say that some of these beetles
Speaker 1: are playing with their poop, but really this is a
Speaker 1: matter of survival. It just looks like playing because they're
Speaker 1: going to do one of three things with these balls
Speaker 1: of poop. They're gonna roll it, They're gonna roll it
Speaker 1: into a tunnel, or they're going to dwell within it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we have the rollers, the tunnelers, and the dwellers.
Speaker 1: The rollers are out there rolling this ball of of
Speaker 1: excrement just across the across the ground, and those are
Speaker 1: the ones that we often see and these compelling nature videos.
Speaker 1: The tunnelers are taking that ball of poop and they're
Speaker 1: going underground with it, and then the dwellers are dwelling
Speaker 1: within the poop mount Yeah, they're saying, why not. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a food source. I can live inside of
Speaker 1: it nice and cool. Yeah, so we have all these
Speaker 1: are dung beetles, but they found sort of different levels
Speaker 1: of exploitation of this resource, the resource being poop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again we should mention to like, not only is
Speaker 1: this a food source for them, but they can also
Speaker 1: make a nest of it to transfer their eggs too.
Speaker 1: So in this other sense though, they are using these
Speaker 1: dung balls to cool off with, and um, it seems
Speaker 1: kind of oddit for but now consider you know, the
Speaker 1: species that are hanging out in substit or in Africa
Speaker 1: and the desert where that that ground can get up
Speaker 1: to sixty degrees celsius and get really really hot, and
Speaker 1: there's lots of dung beetles competing for this dung and
Speaker 1: they've got rolled as fast as they can, and yet
Speaker 1: they have some really clever ways of trying to cool themselves.
Speaker 1: So so how did they cool themselves off in this
Speaker 1: this hot environment with something that you just don't You
Speaker 1: don't think of poop is having any cooling elements. If anything,
Speaker 1: you think of it as being steaming and hot well
Speaker 1: researchers Yoki and Smolka at All they studied how they
Speaker 1: cooled themselves off, and they detailed it in the paper.
Speaker 1: Dung beetles use their dung balls as a mobile thermal refuge.
Speaker 1: And this is This is from the beginning of the paper,
Speaker 1: and I just love it. It says quote. Using infrared
Speaker 1: thermography and behavioral experiments, we show here that dung beetles
Speaker 1: use their dung balls as a mobile thermal refuge onto
Speaker 1: which they climbed to cool down while rolling across hot soil.
Speaker 1: We further demonstrate that the hoist ball functions not only
Speaker 1: as a portable platform, but also as a heat sink,
Speaker 1: which effectively cools the beetle as it rolls or climbs
Speaker 1: onto it. I'm not gonna get I'm not gonna get
Speaker 1: deep into this study here, but I do want to
Speaker 1: tell you that if you look into the study, you
Speaker 1: will see where they have slipped these little socks onto
Speaker 1: their feet and their hind legs um as they are
Speaker 1: rolling the balls. Because they've done various things to try
Speaker 1: to determine how much heat is uh entering the surface
Speaker 1: of their feet and how they're cooling themselves off. But essentially,
Speaker 1: as they're pressing onto that ball, which is a lot
Speaker 1: cooler than the soil than they're cooling off from it,
Speaker 1: they're they're also doing this what looks to be a
Speaker 1: dance on top of the ball. An indeed, to the uninformed,
Speaker 1: I it definitely looks like they're just stopping getting on
Speaker 1: topping the ball and dancing around. But but really you
Speaker 1: could you you should think a bit more in terms
Speaker 1: of like a sailor climbing up the rigging of a
Speaker 1: ship to see what's on the horizon, because that, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, is key to the whole thing, because
Speaker 1: when when did they actually climb a top and do
Speaker 1: their dance. They do it when they're when their first
Speaker 1: leaving the pile of poop, the main depositive poop. They
Speaker 1: do it when they encounter an obstacle. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: they're doing it when they need to see what the
Speaker 1: lay of the land is, where are they taking this ball,
Speaker 1: what is their their ultimate goal with it? And they
Speaker 1: are possibly doing it to cool themselves because they found
Speaker 1: that um that it usually happens at the hottest point
Speaker 1: during the midday heat, so they see more incidences of
Speaker 1: them getting up on the ball and doing this little jig.
Speaker 1: And yeah, some of it though, is like a little
Speaker 1: lookout to see, like, who are my competitors here? He's
Speaker 1: gaining on me um. But any little advantage that they
Speaker 1: can get like that they cool themselves off for the
Speaker 1: briefest of moments helps them when they are making this
Speaker 1: trek across the soil. And by the way, this is
Speaker 1: a straight line that they are rolling these balls into
Speaker 1: and along the way they're often having to deal with
Speaker 1: rival dung beetles fighting them for their their their precious ball,
Speaker 1: which is another thing just to keep in mind about
Speaker 1: their their journey. Yeah, and and again they've got to
Speaker 1: stay on that street path because it turns out this
Speaker 1: is very intentional to have this straight path and they
Speaker 1: may actually be using the milky way to orient themselves.
Speaker 1: And this experiment is pretty adorable. Yeah. This one was
Speaker 1: published in two thirteen in Current Biology, and it actually
Speaker 1: earned a two thirteen Ignoble Prize. Which doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: it's again we've talked about the Nobel Prizes before. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that it's necessarily um useless science or that
Speaker 1: it's uh, you know, completely silly, But maybe it just
Speaker 1: has a silly element to it, such as dung beetles
Speaker 1: wearing hats. Earlier they were wearing socks in a different experiment.
Speaker 1: This time they're wearing hats. Because how are you going
Speaker 1: to test Uh their navigational skills are they? Are they
Speaker 1: depending upon the night sky for their movements or the
Speaker 1: orientation of the milky way? Uh? You have to put
Speaker 1: a little hat on there, a little little visor to
Speaker 1: keep them from looking up. Indeed, so what did they do.
Speaker 1: They set up an outdoor circular arena full of sand,
Speaker 1: and they put the dung beetles in the middle with
Speaker 1: their ball of dung, and they looked at the path
Speaker 1: they took to get to the edge of their arena. Now,
Speaker 1: half of those dung beetles could see the starry night
Speaker 1: no moon, by the way, and the other half had
Speaker 1: those little hats on that you just described. Now, the
Speaker 1: hats only covered the dorsal eyes, the ones on the
Speaker 1: top of their heads, and the ventral eyes were uncovered,
Speaker 1: so they could still see that. So, of course, those
Speaker 1: who are be hatted had a hard time navigating. They
Speaker 1: didn't have the stars to help them navigate. And they
Speaker 1: tested this again by placing the beetles in a planetarium,
Speaker 1: inside an actual planetarium. It's an actual planetarium. Is brilliant, right,
Speaker 1: because they can manipulate um the planetarium. They can make
Speaker 1: it completely dark, they can just have a full moon,
Speaker 1: no moon, or the milky way. And they found that
Speaker 1: the beatles could vigate with the stars or just with
Speaker 1: a milky way, which is again a diffuse band of
Speaker 1: light surrounding a density of stars. And it's not just
Speaker 1: starlight that is important to them. In two thousand three,
Speaker 1: researchers found that one species of dung beetle, the African
Speaker 1: Scarabbas zambanius, navigates by using polarization patterns in moonlight. And
Speaker 1: this was actually the first proof that any animal can
Speaker 1: use polarized moonlight for orientation. Now you had mentioned the
Speaker 1: competition is really fierce, and I just wanted to mention
Speaker 1: that according to dung beetle expert John Freehand quote, the
Speaker 1: behavior of the beatles was much misunderstood until the pioneering
Speaker 1: studies of John Henri Fabre. For example, Fabre corrected the
Speaker 1: myth that a dung beetle would seek aid from dung
Speaker 1: beetles when confronted by obstacles. This is what was got
Speaker 1: it because they probably probably observed like three or four
Speaker 1: dung beetles pushing on a single ball of dung. Yeah. There,
Speaker 1: of course, no one's trying to help anybody and that scenario,
Speaker 1: they're just all fighting for the resources exactly, and uh,
Speaker 1: Freehance says by painstaking observations and experiments, Fabruree found but
Speaker 1: this seeming helpers were in fact robbers awaiting an opportunity
Speaker 1: to steal the rollers food source. Now think about this
Speaker 1: next statistic. I'm talking about at one point five kilogram
Speaker 1: or a three point three pound load of elephant dung
Speaker 1: that gets decimated by sixteen thousand dung beetles in two hours.
Speaker 1: And this is from Dr John Capanier in his book,
Speaker 1: who was describing how very efficiently these beetles will bury, eat,
Speaker 1: or just roll away all the dung and just how
Speaker 1: many competitors there are for it. Yeah, that's an incredible
Speaker 1: stat and it really does underline their important role as
Speaker 1: a recycler in the environment, especially when you have mega
Speaker 1: fauna going around just completely unloading uh you know, over
Speaker 1: the place. Indeed, so what does this mean. It means
Speaker 1: that when it comes to uh, I don't know what
Speaker 1: would you say, like, uh, to get in that ball,
Speaker 1: to to obtaining the prize, you're going to have to
Speaker 1: engage in a little bit of combat. Oh yeah, you
Speaker 1: know that. What keeps coming to mind for me when
Speaker 1: we keep talking about this, I keep thinking about mad Max,
Speaker 1: particularly the road wire, where the commodity that everyone's arrestient
Speaker 1: is gasoline, and so everyone's after the gasoline and all
Speaker 1: these souped up vehicles with spikes on the front and
Speaker 1: gatling guns and grappling hooks and what have you, and
Speaker 1: they're just roaring across this desert environment. And I see
Speaker 1: a lot of that in the scare of beetle. There's
Speaker 1: a precious commodity at hand. There's a lot of competition
Speaker 1: for that commodity, and in order to to obtain it,
Speaker 1: to defend it, and to actually do something with it,
Speaker 1: you've you've got a arm up, you do. And this
Speaker 1: is where it becomes so important. This uh you know again,
Speaker 1: a thirty million year odyssey with poop for for dung
Speaker 1: beetles that they actually evolve horns to compete dung. Now
Speaker 1: Nicola Watson and Lee Simmons of the University of Western
Speaker 1: Australian Perth. What did they do to find out how
Speaker 1: important horns are. Well, they pitted female dung beetles Alpha
Speaker 1: fascists Sagittarius against each other in a race for dung,
Speaker 1: and they were matched for body size. They're all in
Speaker 1: the same weight bracket. I suppose um females with bigger
Speaker 1: horns managed to collect more dung and provide, you know,
Speaker 1: better for their offspring. And they publish their findings in
Speaker 1: the March two thousand and ten edition of the Proceedings
Speaker 1: of the Royal Society. So again here you have this idea. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, if you if you've evolved to have the
Speaker 1: biggest um pair of these horns, then perhaps you're going
Speaker 1: to be much better fit to fight off your competitors
Speaker 1: and provide for your family. The other interesting thing about
Speaker 1: the horns, and this with this particular species from this study,
Speaker 1: is that the female has a central horn arrangement like
Speaker 1: a rhino. And again they're they're much larger, uh, and
Speaker 1: then the male has like smaller kind of side by
Speaker 1: side devil horn scenario going on. So it's not just
Speaker 1: to simply a matter of oh, well, you know, one
Speaker 1: one minute. One side of the species has small horns,
Speaker 1: in otherlane has big ones. It's like it's a different arrangement.
Speaker 1: It's a different morphology that has has emerged in the
Speaker 1: males versus the females with with with a different purpose
Speaker 1: in mind. Yeah, and even the tunnelers will have different
Speaker 1: horns than the non tunnelers. And it made me think
Speaker 1: about the antlers episode when we were talking about deer
Speaker 1: and different species having different lengths and different ways to
Speaker 1: sort of tangle with them. Yeah. I was actually reading
Speaker 1: through a Douglas J. Inland's excellent book Animal Weapons, which
Speaker 1: is all about the evolution of of things such as
Speaker 1: horns and antlers and other defensive mechanisms and this sort
Speaker 1: of the arms race of evolution. Uh. And he pointed
Speaker 1: out that species that fight one on one and often
Speaker 1: have elaborate horns, and species that fight in chaotic scrambles
Speaker 1: do not. So in the dung beetles, for instance, that
Speaker 1: dunge bill is out there on that that ball of excrement.
Speaker 1: Having to fight three or four at once, you'll see
Speaker 1: a less impressive display. But if it's one on one,
Speaker 1: particularly in a tunnel, that's where you'll see really crazy arrangements.
Speaker 1: Uh in one says burrows are probably the most widespread
Speaker 1: ecological situation leading to the evolution of extreme weapons. Uh
Speaker 1: and this is because the tunnels are localized, they're readily
Speaker 1: defendable and uh and and indeed some of these, uh
Speaker 1: these arrangements are just really intense because you can imagine
Speaker 1: that that tunnel environment, it's all about front loading your
Speaker 1: your weaponry and and defending the entrance at all costs. Well,
Speaker 1: and that makes sense. You're gonna respond to it in
Speaker 1: a certain way, or I would say that biology and
Speaker 1: nature is going to respond to it in a certain way.
Speaker 1: And I was just even thinking back to the episode
Speaker 1: on Left Handed People, and we were talking about the
Speaker 1: castle in Scotland, in which that I believe it was
Speaker 1: the generations of uh of it was its soldiers there
Speaker 1: who were defending the castle. They were left handed, and
Speaker 1: they had built the castle specifically so that they would
Speaker 1: have the advantage when they came around the corners. So
Speaker 1: about the tunnel, So in that same sense, here you see,
Speaker 1: you know, a kind of evolution or adaptation to try
Speaker 1: to be as effective as you possibly can. And in
Speaker 1: all of this, another thing to keep in mind about
Speaker 1: that commodity, that precious commodity of dung, is that it
Speaker 1: loses its um its power quickly. So any time that
Speaker 1: the dung beetles are having to just pounce on it,
Speaker 1: they have to they have to take advantage of it
Speaker 1: quickly because it's going to lose its potency, it's going
Speaker 1: to lose its its value. And that's another reason why
Speaker 1: the elephant dun disappears so quickly, because there's a there's
Speaker 1: a half life on this stuff. Indeed, um why there's
Speaker 1: not a Disney pick? So are film all this? I
Speaker 1: just don't know. Yeah, it seems like there's plenty there.
Speaker 1: I mean, just they're they're they're already a little more
Speaker 1: comfy and a little more relatable as organisms do to
Speaker 1: their they're sort of family structure, if you will. They
Speaker 1: have this very animated thing that they do, pushing this
Speaker 1: ball around or living in tunnels. They're they're elaborate looking.
Speaker 1: There's a rich mythology associated with them. It seems like
Speaker 1: you could just go wild. Yeah, and they're kind of
Speaker 1: romantic and star guard write. You've got the astronomy going exactly.
Speaker 1: They're looking up at the heavens and experiments they're wearing
Speaker 1: socks and hats. I mean, really, what more could you
Speaker 1: ask for? Yeah? Done, Beatles life. That's what we need,
Speaker 1: all right. Um, you guys, if you are interested in
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Speaker 1: And if you guys have some thoughts on dung beetle mania,
Speaker 1: you can send them to us at blew the Mind
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