Wikipedia Beetles Dung Beetles Are Beetles That Feed on Feces
Wikipedia beetles Dung beetles are beetles that feed on feces. Some species of dung beetles can bury dung times their own mass in one night. Many dung beetles, known as rollers , roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or breeding chambers. Others, 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 collected by burrowing owls. There are dung beetle species of different colours and sizes, and some functional traits such as body mass or biomass and leg length can have high levels of variability. 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, species. The nocturnal African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus is one of the few known non-vertebrate animals that navigate and orient themselves using the Milky Way. Dung beetles are not a single taxonomic group; dung feeding is found in a number of families of beetles, so the behaviour cannot be assumed to have evolved only once. Dung beetles live in many habitats , including desert, grasslands and savannas , [9] farmlands , and native and planted forests. They are found on all continents except Antarctica. They eat the dung of herbivores and omnivores , and prefer that produced by the latter.
[Show full text]