Animal · South Africa, Botswana, Namibia
Dung beetle
Scarabaeus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The dung beetle shapes fresh animal droppings into a round ball and rolls it away in a straight line before burying it as food. To hold that line at night, one African species steers by the glow of the Milky Way.
Picture credit: Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Mosmas (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the dung beetle live?
Home: in savannahs, pastures and open woodland.
In the wild it lives in these countries: South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya.
The short profile
Fully grown: 1–3 cm long. It weighs about 0 002 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
There are thousands of dung beetle species, on every continent except Antarctica. Scientists sort them into three kinds: rollers, which shape a ball and push it away, tunnellers, which dig straight down under the pile, and dwellers, which simply move in. A roller works upside down, head near the ground and back legs on the ball, so it cannot see where it is going and needs another guide. In 2013 Marie Dacke and her team took the southern African beetle Scarabaeus satyrus into the Johannesburg planetarium and switched the sky on and off. The beetles rolled straight under a full starry sky and just as straight under the band of the Milky Way alone, but wandered in circles when the dome was dark or when they wore little caps over their eyes. It was the first time an insect was shown to use our galaxy as a compass. All that rolling matters far beyond the beetle, because buried dung feeds the soil, spreads seeds and takes breeding places away from flies.
Find it on the globe
Dung beetle is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big is a dung beetle?
Most are 1 to 3 cm long, about the size of a thumbnail. The ball they push can be a good deal bigger than the beetle itself.
Where do dung beetles live?
On every continent except Antarctica, wherever big plant eaters leave droppings, in deserts, grasslands, farmland and forests. The star-rolling species from the planetarium study comes from southern Africa.
How do they roll straight in the dark?
They climb on top of the ball first and take a look at the sky. On moonless nights Scarabaeus satyrus uses the bright band of the Milky Way, and with a tiny cap over its eyes it only goes round in circles.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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