For our April Writers’ Group theme we tried something different: PICK A BOOK- CHOOSE A PAGE TO MATCH YOUR AGE – USE THE FIRST SENTENCE FROM THE 4TH PARAGRAPH AS YOUR INSPIRATION. Please note that the links don’t work as these have been copied and pasted from another document.
“Do not gather insects feeding on refuse or dung – they are likely to carry infection.”
From The SAS Survival Handbook by John Wiseman (1993 reprint). Page 67, paragraph 4.
With dwindling resources on this planet of ours, we are all familiar with the need to recycle, re-use, and re-purpose a wide variety of items – from paper and cardboard, food cans, plastic and glass collected by the local authority, or donating items to charity shops or through Freecycle or other community groups.
Most clothes can be altered and re-styled: dresses turned into shorter tunics, trousers into crops or shorts, or adult clothes re-purposed for children. Jeans can even be transformed into skirts. In the skilled hands of a tailor or seamstress, you could have a new wardrobe for less than half the price of buying new clothes. I have recently had four pairs of trousers altered for the price of buying one new pair of the same style.
Even the humble battery can be broken down into its constituent parts, most of which can be re-used to make new batteries or used in other manufactured goods.
We are bombarded with media reports citing the need to protect our bees and re-wild areas. Our farmers are instructed to plant trees and increase field margins to provide nature corridors for wildlife. But how many farmers, in these days of chemical fertilisers and additive-filled animal feed, consider the usefulness and importance of . . . the humble dung beetle?
Not the giant beetles of the African continent forever rolling balls of elephant dung in a never-ending Sisyphean feat of strength, but the sixty or so varieties of dung beetle that currently inhabit our British countryside.
All dung beetles belong to the scarab family (Scarabaeoidea), but not all scarabs are dung beetles. British dung beetles are either ‘dwellers’ (endocoprids) – living within the dung – or ‘tunnellers’ (paracoprids) – living in burrows they’ve dug up to 1 metre down beneath a pile of dung. Both use the dung to feed themselves and their offspring.
Dung beetle eggs are small and the females lay between 10 up to a few thousand, though lower numbers are more likely. The eggs hatch after a few days into C-shaped grubs. After 1-4 weeks feasting on dung, they pupate for anything between a few weeks to several months before the adults emerge. Environmental factors can cause them to delay emergence, and there might be two broods in a year. If it is fast moving, it isn’t a dung beetle.
Despite the profusion of animal waste available in the countryside, dung beetles are picky; their preferred dung comes from herbivores feeding on natural products. So horses, cows, goats and rabbits that are left to graze on grass and other herbaceous plants leave the best dung – dry, solid and rich in nitrogen; while those animals fed a less natural diet, including grains or anything that produces looser, wetter droppings, are not as ‘tasty’, though some beetles will eat anything, and others may eat fungi, fruit, and rotting plant material. Some predate on other insects.
Without dung beetles, we would be up to our knees in excrement! One cow can produce 9 tonnes of dung per year![1] Without dung beetles, pastures would be barren wastelands.
When the first Europeans took horses and cattle to Australia, they had a problem with flies because there was so much dung but no dung beetles to feed on it. Their indigenous dung beetles feed only on the droppings of marsupials. In the 1960s, the Australian government spent a fortune on importing European and African dung beetles to do the job.
Dung beetles are nature’s recyclers. They improve pasture by removing waste, which keeps fly populations under control. They help to improve soil conditions and return nutrients to the ground – after they’ve passed through the beetles’ digestive system. Research from 2015[2] indicates that protecting our native dung beetles has an economic benefit to the cattle industry alone of approximately £367 million, which could be reduced by £40 million a year if farmers stopped treating their cattle with anthelmintics – used to treat infections of animals with parasitic worms. This includes both flat worms, e.g., flukes (trematodes) and tapeworms (cestodes) as well as round worms (nematodes). Use of pesticides also had a detrimental effect on dung beetles and is therefore counter-productive as toxic dung will kill the beetles. Of our four nations, only the Welsh Government has produced information on the importance of dung beetles to agriculture.[3]
Dung beetle species differ throughout Britain. The Dung Beetle UK Mapping Project (DUMP)[4] in collaboration with the Biological Records Centre, ran a project where people around the country could submit details of any insects they found. That project has now finished but the results are available online[5].
For example, a search for Hawarden [where our writing group is based] (up to 10 km radius) brings up a list[6] of 2713 insects alone, including many beetles. I’m sure there are a few dung beetles within that list if anyone cares to look for them.
In 2017, after two decades of no recorded sightings, a tiny rare scarab beetle, Aphodius brevis, was rediscovered in sand dunes on the Sefton coastline.[7] (For some reason the link address shows “a new species of spider” rather than extinct dung beetle.)
To be fair, our native dung beetles aren’t the most photogenic or colourful, unlike the jewel-like scarab beetles revered (and worn) by then ancient Egyptians, but they do a wonderful job with little recognition of the vital role they have played since before dinosaurs roamed the earth, though I can’t begin to imagine the size or numbers of beetles needed to deal with all that dung![8]
Dung beetles perform one final important function – as food for bats, birds and some mammals. When unearthed, as with other beetles, dung beetles will ‘play dead’. As prefaced in the extract above, dung beetles are not fit for human consumption, no matter how peckish you might be!
[1]https://www.bnhs.co.uk/2019/conf/conf2018/2018conftalk2_UKDungBeetles.pdf
[2] https://resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/een.12240
[3] https://businesswales.gov.wales/farmingconnect/news-and-events/factsheets/role-dung-beetles-livestock-farms-20092022
[4] https://dungbeetlemap.wordpress.com/
[6] https://records.nbnatlas.org/explore/your-area#53.1857|-3.0298|11|Insects
[7] https://www.northwestinvertebrates.org.uk/new-species-spider-discovered-cheshire-2/
[8] https://animals.howstuffworks.com/dinosaurs/dinosaur-poop-dung-beetle-evolution.htm
Fiction from my keyboard (and some nonfiction too) 