The natural world, like the human world, is awash with celebrity. A lists, B lists and everything underneath. It’s entirely imposed upon it by us, of course, and for better or worse it tends to be how conservation works, with some animals and habitats being ‘causes célèbres’ and others being……well…..the opposite.
On the one hand we have the animals that tabloid newspapers might describe as ‘sexy’. In Scotland that might be eagles, otters, red deer. The animals that seem to have their own publicity machine to grab headlines, get their images shared on Twitter and generate public interest with relative ease. Unsurprisingly, these are the animals that people centre whole holidays around. Think eagles on Mull, otters in Shetland, red deer in the highlands. That’s the A List.
Some animals, on the other hand, can only dream of such lofty heights. These poor creatures don’t have their own PR executives or media department. Unloved and overlooked, they have to write their own press releases and compile their own news bulletins in an effort to relate their importance or value to the world. In so doing they sadly discover that the only headline inches they can grab are the ones in the kinds of magazines that are mocked on a weekly basis by satirical news quiz Have I got news for You. The nature equivalents of the show’s hilarious ‘guest publications’, where the panelists have to guess the missing words from a headline. Think….Professional Toenail Clipper, Spanner Enthusiast or Cavity Wall Insulator Quarterly.
It’s sad for those animals of course, for while all creatures perform a role in this big wide world (just as all humans do) some creatures perhaps have a role in nature somewhat more significant than many a headline grabber does. Vital roles, in fact. Some might say indispensable. Without whom our lives would be that much more complicated and, in the case of this month’s subject, certainly much more smelly.
The humble dumbledor – one of our invaluable dung beetles
The parallel I’m labouring here is that of the dustman. The refuse collectors. The people who run around after humanity, clearing up our mess. Those people deserve medals, as they’re dutiful public servants who are largely overlooked their whole lives without wider public praise. Taken for granted and invisible when they do what they’re paid to do, and yet whose absence is painfully felt when they don’t. Anyone who remembers bin strikes will know how quickly rubbish accumulates if not taken away, how rancid it smells and how it readily it attracts wildlife.
So the question is, what would you do without your dustman? You’d have to clear up your own mess, and believe me it would take up A LOT of your time.
Okay, I’ve preambled for long enough now. Almost half of this article in fact, in a cynical attempt to tug on your heartstrings and pique your interest. Why? Because, dear reader, I am going to talk about poo. A lot. And admittedly it’s not the most enticing of subjects, hence the shameful referencing of a Harry Potter character to draw you in. But it’s an entirely justified ploy, for his is one of the old names by which our enigmatic creature is occasionally known.
Dumbledore is, of course, the wise old wizard at the helm of Hogwarts. ‘Dumble’ is apparently an old word for slow or blundering, whereas ‘dor’ was used to describe any large, droning winged insect. Put the two together and you have a nice word that was once used to describe bumblebees and maybugs among others. JK Rowling said in an interview back in 1999 that she imagined Dumbledore ‘walking around humming to himself’ like a bumblebee, hence the choice of name, but these days it appears to be more commonly used to describe a dung beetle. The Dor Beetle to be precise.
And so, not before time we meet Dumbledor, our dutiful dustman.
A dor beetle approaching some sheep dung. The beetle was able to prise this enormous weight upwards despite its modest size.
You might be surprised to hear that we have dung beetles in the UK. For some reason we tend to associate them with more exotic places overseas, where wildebeest and zebras poo far and wide. But we do indeed have them here……and thank goodness we do!
Dung beetles are creatures whose lifecycles centre upon, in, or revolve around dung. Eating it, living in it and laying their eggs in it. Yep, it’s a tad unsavoury, but just consider what would happen if we didn’t have dung beetles.
These days it’s trendy to describe these kinds of things as ‘ecosystem services’. It’s a term used to describe the benefits (crucially, to Johnny Human) that wildlife and nature bring about by their simple existence. These might include riverside vegetation helping to alleviate flooding downstream, peat locking up carbon dioxide in the ground, or urban trees cleaning the air around them of pollutants.
The phrase is an effective way of explaining exactly what role a creature plays but, depressingly, ‘ecosystem services’ are often explained in financial terms as part of the planning process, coldly citing a species or habitat’s worth to human societies or health as the main reasons to save them from the threat of new development. All too often, conservation has to appeal to cold economics to get a positive result and, in that context, dung beetles surely rank highly as cost-effective creatures to keep on our land.
Finding good figures for the amount of poo deposited in the countryside by animals is hard to come by, so let’s do it in a very rough way. Your average cow will drop approximately a dozen pats per day. For a modest Scottish herd of 100 cows that’s 438,000 pats per year! From just 100 cows! In Bugs Britannica, Peter Marren and Richard Mabey write how:‘The American Institute of Biological Sciences reckons that were it not for dung beetles, the US cattle industry would have to spend $280m every year cleaning it up’.
Ouch!
You don’t often see their undersides but, when you do, the iridescence is stunning! Note the spiny legs, used for digging and dragging.
But let’s also consider sheep and red deer, the two upland grazers we encounter most frequently in the Scottish uplands. They’re not nearly as prolific pooers (is that even a word?) as cows, but when you consider that there are approximately 6.5 million sheep and 400,000 red deer in Scotland, then the need for some form of natural waste disposal is clear. Enter stage left, Dumbledor.
True, dung beetles aren’t the only creatures dining out on dung. Various other ‘decomposers’ such as fungi and bacteria do the same thing, but dung beetles shift a substantial proportion of it. A dor beetle will eat its own body weight of dung a day, mainly because dung isn’t a terribly nutritious meal and so it needs a lot of it.
But while keeping our boots cleaner is one obvious benefit of dung beetles, their role in the ecosystem goes much further than that. They recycle nutrients from dung, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, back into the soil. And by breaking up dung and cow pats they greatly reduce the amount of methane, a greenhouse gas, being produced and released into the atmosphere.
So while it might seem that there’s a lot of poo in the countryside, if we didn’t have dung beetles there’d be a damned sight more! In short, we cannot do without them.
Meet our dustman
There are a fair few different types of dung beetle but they can be split into three groups. Dwellers, rollers and tunnelers. Most species in the UK are ‘dwellers’, living and breeding IN the dung and are therefore not frequently seen. ‘Rollers’, surprise surprise, roll dung into a ball and then roll it some distance to their burrows. As far as I’m aware the minotaur beetle, very rare in Scotland, is our only UK roller although I did see Dumbledor doing a good impersonation recently.
By my left finger is a spherical hare dropping. By my right finger is entrance to the beetle’s burrow.
Dumbledor is a ‘tunneler’. It seeks out dung and then digs burrows through it or up to 1 metre deep into the ground below it, thereafter dragging pieces of dung downwards for storage.
Of course, it needs to get underneath said dung first, which is a huge deal when the sheep poo you’ve found is perhaps 30 times larger and heavier than you are. But these wee insects are extremely strong. I watched one the other week in Glenalmond approaching some dried sheep poo and then pushing underneath it. To my amazement the whole pile moved upwards as the tiny beetle pushed its way underneath. I lifted the poo slightly and it was easily the weight of a hefty chocolate bar. Incredible really. But great strength is something all dung beetles possess.
The insect record, and perhaps even the record in nature for shifting the equivalent of one’s own body weight, is held by the male horned dung beetle. It can move a weight 1141 times as heavy as itself. That’s famously the same as a human pulling six fully laden double decker buses! Is that not incredible!?
Once the female dor beetle has dug her burrow, she also digs chambers off of it. The male fetches pieces of dung to take back to the burrow and puts some in each chamber, then the female lays one egg in each chamber. When the larvae hatch, they’ll have plenty to eat!
Though I’m talking about Dumbledor as a single species, ‘dor beetle’ is a generic term for a small group of tunnelling dung beetles that look alike. They have spines on their legs to help them dig and drag soil and dung, but their size depends on their species and sex. They can be up to an inch long, but generally speaking you’re looking for a stocky black beetle 2cm long, perhaps with a metallic sheen, that is actually quite cute looking. Yep, that’s right. Cute looking!
They do fly, but not so much during the day. They’re more likely to be seen crawling slowly towards dung or digging underneath it, which means they are quite easy to spot. Indeed recently I’ve been hard pressed NOT to spot them. At Glen Uig in Angus there was a dor beetle at least every second step I took. They, like poo, are everywhere!
Though they drag dung over short distances rather than roll it, they do still manoeuvre dung across the ground and down into their burrows. And that’s exactly what I saw for the very first time, the other week up above Glenalmond in Perthshire. I’d never seen a dor beetle rolling anything before, but here was our Dumbledor grappling with a mountain hare dropping. It was much larger than the tiny entrance to its burrow, so it thought better of it and reversed down its hole.
Dumbledor dragging the spherical hare dropping towards its burrow. Amazing to see!
It was a scene straight out of a David Attenborough documentary, but this wasn’t some exotic place overseas, this was upland Scotland. My back yard! And it was every bit as exciting as the A-list white-tailed eagle flypast I’d been treated to not ten minutes earlier. Honest!
The world of the small really does have celebrities of its own, and they’re deserving of our respect and attention. I’m certainly not expecting anyone to centre an entire holiday around dung beetles….although respect to you if you do so! But perhaps the next time you’re out walking and you pass a cowpat or sheep dung, spare a thought for the myriad creatures that clear up around us, and in particular for a dustman named Dumbledor.
PS – Oh and yes, I washed my hands after lifting the ‘chocolate bar’!