Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles.

So obviously beetles can see polarized light.

We don't know yet what dung beetles use.

These goliath beetles are wired in their wings.

So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.

And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here.

This includes many groups of moths, beetles, praying mantids and lacewings.

While living in Terang, he began to collect beetles and study biology.

And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort.

If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground.

Okay, so what we've got so far is, what are beetles doing? They're rolling balls.

Wallace collected more than 126,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago (more than 80,000 beetles alone).

Tiger Beetles of Alberta Killers on the Clay, Stalkers on the Sand by John Acorn.

The combined light from these beetles these are actually tiny beetles is so bright that fishermen out at sea can use them as navigating beacons to find their way back to their home rivers. It's stunning.

And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles.

Now wouldn't you know it, there's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature.

Like all insects, beetles' bodies are divided into three sections the head, the thorax, and the abdomen.

Tadpoles are highly vulnerable to being eaten by fish, newts, predatory diving beetles, and birds, such as kingfishers.

Bates was nineteen years old, and in 1843 he had published a paper on beetles in the journal Zoologist .

Other species are adapted to pollination by butterflies and moths, carrion flies and long proboscid flies, and even monkey beetles.

Myxophaga is the second smallest suborder of Coleoptera after Archostemata, consisting of approximately 65 species of small to minute beetles in four families.

The depiction of Indian cuisine was also condemned as it has no relation whatsoever with baby snakes, eyeball soup, beetles and chilled monkey brains.

And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung feeders.

When they arrived, brown domes made of crisscrossed branches and layers of multicolored mats would appear like crowds of dappled beetles on the outskirts of town.

So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems.

Several groups of ants cultivate fungi in the order Agaricales as their primary food source, while ambrosia beetles cultivate various species of fungi in the bark of trees that they infest.

They used the name through May, when they became the Silver Beetles, before undertaking a brief tour of Scotland as the backing group for pop singer and fellow Liverpudlian Johnny Gentle.

So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior.

Egg and nestling predators include ghost crabs, oligochaete worms, beetles, fly larvae, ants, parasitoid wasp larvae, flesh flies, snakes, gulls, corvids, opossums, bears, rats, armadillos, mustelids, skunks, canids, procyonids, cats, pigs, and humans.

The important thing here is that this is not a one way trip, as in most dung beetles. The trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site.

For example, birds visit red flowers with long, narrow tubes and lots of nectar, but are not as strongly attracted to wide flowers with little nectar and copious pollen, which are more attractive to beetles.

So this dung pat was actually well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well adapted to rolling balls of dung.

Think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils, like Charles Darwin, for example, or, the hired help of a nobleman, like Joseph Priestley, who was the literary companion to the Marquis of Lansdowne when he discovered oxygen.

Termites on the African savannah are also known to cultivate fungi, and yeasts of the genera Candida and Lachancea inhabit the gut of a wide range of insects, including neuropterans, beetles, and cockroaches it is not known whether these fungi benefit their hosts.

But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see.