Marcus Byrne The dance of the dung beetle

This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing.

Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground.

37) (1989) Beetle Bailey Celebration (1989) Andrews McMeel Beetle Bailey Beetle Mania!

Blue Beetle (Dan Garrett) and Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) at the International Catalogue of Superheroes Blue Beetle (Dan Garrett), Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) and

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

This beetle, unlike this chip bag here, this beetle uses one material, chitin.

Watch how often the beetle dances.

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.

And look at what the beetle does.

My dad used to drive a Beetle.

They remove dung, they pollinate our crops.

13) (1976) Is That All, Beetle Bailey (No.

We don't know yet what dung beetles use.

A dung beetle has a brain the size of a grain of rice, and yet shows a tremendous amount of intelligence when it comes to rolling its food source animal excrement home. How? It all comes down to a dance. em em

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.

4) (1970) What Is It Now, Beetle Bailey (No.

They are grown completely in a ball of dung.

And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets.

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.

Garrett changed into Blue Beetle, but was killed in battle.

Turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle.

This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away.

The film references Calvin Klein, IKEA, and the Volkswagen New Beetle.

So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball.

My dung is burned as fuel. My milk is used for cheese.

In this film, Herbie falls in love with a yellow Volkswagen New Beetle.

And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung.

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

So let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test.

The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog.

Beetle is always seen with a hat or helmet covering his forehead and eyes.

The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld.

So the truth is, if you look at the temperature over here, dung is cool.

but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it.

On the outward path, he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung.

So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel.

Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting.

So all we're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background.

He displaces the beetle, and now we have to see what is going to take place.

The early Volkswagen Beetle and many motorcycles, however, use a cable driven from a front wheel.

So watch this beetle, and there's two things that I would like you to be aware of.

So let's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment.

Beetle Bailey (begun on September 4, 1950) is an American comic strip created by cartoonist Mort Walker.

And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball.