Look at this lovely sphere of shit and the handsome beetle pushing it.
So strong, so nimble. Did you know that these sculpted orbs of faeces are gifts from the male dung beetles to female ones? It’s part of their courtship. If she accepts, then the dung orb will become the place where she lays her eggs, providing shelter and nutrition for the next generation of beetles.
If I was a female dung beetle, I’d definitely be seduced by that orb of shit depicted above. Look how round it is. It’s the platonic ideal of a dung ball. That beetle is a neo-platonist.
Check this one out:
Not as handsome, but he is wearing a hat. We could stop this post right here and it would have been worth it, but no - prepare to be delighted.
So if you had to guess, why do you think that professional scientists would go to the time and expense of designing and making bespoke chapeaux for these little dung beetles?
As is the case with most game-changing breakthroughs in the fashion world, beetle hats began with a state of bafflement. How, thought the scientists, do these insects manage to push their orbs of shit in relatively straight lines from the dung-heap to the nest-hole, especially when their favoured method is to hoist the shit upside-down and backwards (with their heads to the ground), sometimes for over a mile?
The trick has to do with the dung beetle’s eyes. Unlike humans, they’re able to perceive the polarisation patterns of the sun, so when they’ve finished sculpting their majestic spheres of shit, or when they get thrown off course by a sudden slope or ambush, the beetles climb on top of the shit and orient themselves to the patterns of light coming in from the sun. It’s known as the dung beetle dance.
“Oh, I remember now. It’s that way.”
The mystery deepens when you discover that some dung beetles are nocturnal. They couldn’t possibly rely on moonlight could they? Well they do, but what really stumped the scientists was when the beetles were still getting their shit straight even on moonless nights. Heads down, difficult terrain, but straight(ish) pushing all the way from the steaming pile of giraffe dung to the nest-hole way off yonder.
Most of you reading this will live in a part of the world where we have diluted the night sky with a gauze of artificial light, but out in beetle-lands such as the Kalahari desert, the sky is alive with stars.
Nocturnal dung beetles navigate by starlight. They stand upon their balls of shit and gaze into the resplendence of our home galaxy, its spiral arms reaching out into the deeper regions of the cosmos.
So breath-taking is the experience that some beetles have even been known to write poetry about it.
That bit’s a joke, but the rest is true. You can read about it in Science.
If my research serves me well, some special of nocturnal dung beetles have two pairs of eyes, which the scientists call ventral and dorsal, but we’ll call them ground-eyes and star-eyes. What the beetle hats do is obscure their star-eyes whilst leaving their ground-eyes unblinkered. These unfortunate beetles, no doubt confused by their new apparel, were unable to find their way back home to their nests, thus showing their reliance on starlight for navigation (or their fury and confused at being given sci-fi B-movie hats).
Shout out to Professors Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant and their colleagues at Lund University for this highly creative scientific work.
There’s something genuinely inspiring about these links between animals and stars. We explored the imaginal dimension of that connection in a earlier post called The Star and the Animal, but here, with the dung beetles, we really get at the balls of reality, cupping them lovingly in an expression of profound cosmic eros.
If this piece on dung beetles has got you excited then let me know in the commenets and we can maybe do another one. Apart from their ecological importance, dung beetles are bringers of divine light and creativity. Just ask the Egyptians.
Who wants to start a beetle cult?