Wildlife
Given their name, it should come as no surprise that dung beetles feed on faeces, which makes them useful recyclers. There are three main types of dung beetles: rollers, tunnellers and dwellers. The dwellers actually live in the dung. Typical dung beetle appearance is a grooved shield, large, strong front limbs for digging and fighting and elongated back legs for holding on to dung balls whilst rolling them along. Long flying wings are folded under hard wing covers. Some of the well known families in the dung beetle superfamily are the stag, bess and scarab beetles. Dung beetles can be found on every continent except Antarctica.
Did you know?
There is a species of African dung beetle that navigates by the polarization patterns in moonlight.
In order to see this content you need to have an up-to-date version of Flash installed and Javascript turned on.
Roll with it
A dung beetle gets stuck rolling a ball of dung between two sand dunes.
A dung beetle gets stuck rolling a ball of dung between two sand dunes.
Dung feast
A ball of dung provides an underground feast.
A ball of dung provides an underground feast.
Farmland bats
Cattle fields with marginal hedgerows provide the perfect habitat for horseshoe bats.
Cattle fields with marginal hedgerows provide the perfect habitat for horseshoe bats.
Dung deal
Nothing remotely edible stays in the forest for long. Fresh dung is no exception.
Nothing remotely edible stays in the forest for long. Fresh dung is no exception.
Diligent dung beetles
Dung beetles clean up after the herds in the Serengeti.
Dung beetles clean up after the herds in the Serengeti.
The Dung beetles can be found in a number of locations including: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, Russia, South America. Find out more about these places and what else lives there.
Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.
Additional data source: Animal Diversity Web
Dung beetles are beetles that feed partly or exclusively on feces. All the species belong to the superfamily Scarabaeoidea; most of them to the subfamilies Scarabaeinae and Aphodiinae of the family Scarabaeidae (scarab beetles). As most species of Scarabaeinae feed exclusively on feces, that subfamily is often dubbed true dung beetles. There are dung-feeding beetles which belong to other families, such as the Geotrupidae (the earth-boring dung beetle). The Scarabaeinae alone comprises more than 5,000 species.
Many dung beetles, known as rollers, roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or brooding chambers. Other dung beetles, known as tunnelers, bury the dung wherever they find it. A third group, the dwellers, neither roll nor burrow: they simply live in manure. They are often attracted by the dung burrowing owls collect.
Dung beetles are currently the only animal, other than humans, known to navigate and orient themselves using the Milky Way.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the user-contributed encyclopedia. If you find the content in the 'About' section factually incorrect, defamatory or highly offensive you can edit this article at Wikipedia. For more information on our use of Wikipedia please read our FAQ.
Take a trip through the natural world with our themed collections of video clips from the natural history archive.
African Wildlife
Sir David Attenborough's Africa series took over four years to make and has brought us eye to eye with the continent's incredible wildlife in spectacular ways.
BBC © 2013 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.
Scarab beetles
Bess beetles
Stag beetles
Dung eater
Adapted to flying
Metamorphosis
Egg layer
Adapted to running