Bertie Beetle

Call that beetle!

Who's the beetle?

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

Watch how often the beetle dances.

This is a dung beetle.

Statistically, one of you is a beetle.

And look at what the beetle does.

To hear that beetle talk, you'd think somethin' was going to happen to us.

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

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

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

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

This is a little critter that's in the Namibian desert.

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

Because if you look closely at the beetle's shell, there are lots of little bumps on that shell.

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.

Adam is convinced to return his power to Shazam, so that he could save Isis from her corruption.

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

This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

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

This is the Namibian fog basking beetle, and it's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert.

So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle's shell.

And then at the back of the greenhouse, it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle.

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

And the fog comes in and it builds up on the tips. And it goes down the sides and goes into the critter's mouth.

I mean, a stag beetle it's got two points for jaws, it's got antennae. Can you be that specific in the detail?

Capitalizing on public interest in the topic, he wrote The Gold Bug incorporating ciphers as an essential part of the story.

And this is a Moraea from South Africa, where they're actually pretending to be scarab beetles trying to entice other beetles to come and visit the flower.

There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest.

Now there's two ways it could be doing that, and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it's at the foraging site.

What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky.

And what's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot, it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food, and then when it finds food, it heads straight home.

The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in.

And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle's shell.

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 the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across.

And in this experiment here, what we did was we forced them into a channel, and you can see he wasn't particularly forced into this particular channel, and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in, in the first place.