Dung beetles are amazing little critters mainly because they mould pieces of discarded poop into little balls and then roll them along the ground and back to their nest to feed them to their young. Keeping in mind I don’t really know of any poop that isn’t discarded once it’s been discarded, except, of course, if you’re a dung beetle, in which case you’ll un-discard it and roll it back home to the kids and when they complain, “I’m hungry mum…what’s for dinner?” You can cheerfully say, “Poop on toast.” Yep, that’s right kids, it’s the same ol’ shit again, and that’s what makes them amazing little critters.
I wonder what dung beetles do when they have a poop? By that I mean, if we humans were to sit down and eat a T-bone with chips and a side-salad we’d eventually poop out poop, but dung beetles eat poop, so after a dung beetle sits down and tucks into a nice hearty meal of poop with poop and a side-poop do they eventually poop out a well-done steak with chips and a salad? Crikey! Even a cow or a horse, who only eat grass, will poop out poop, so what the hell does a dung beetle poop out? It reminds of the bloke who went to the doctor and said, “Doc, I’m have a problem, every time I eat carrots…I poop carrots and every time I eat peas…I poop peas, what can I do?” The doc thinks for a second and says, “Eat poop.”
Australia has its own native dung beetles but inevitably foreign dung beetles were imported because the introduction of sheep and cattle meant the local dung beetles couldn’t keep up with demand, they were literally up to their necks in poop. They were being overloaded with work and, even with overtime, were running behind, literally, and, even to a dung beetle, the words ‘running’ and ‘behind’ are not a pleasant thought. It’s hard to roll a ball that isn’t, if you know what I mean. So now Australia has foreign dung beetles who prefer to eat common farm animal’s poop as opposed to Aussie dung beetles who prefer to eat the likes of kangaroo, koala and wombat faeces and I don’t blame them, there’s no accounting for taste.
Cheers, vicplume.com
Tags: animals, aussie, australia, beetles, cattle, dung, farm, kangaroo, koala, plume, poop, salad, sheep, t-bone, vic, wombat
