However most of the dinosaurs went extinct and their bird ancestors don’t produce dung, so the dung beetles changed their focus to megafauna mammal poop. Elephant dung!
Apparently dung beetles will even fight over it.
So now it’s come full circle. A living dinosaur eats the dung beetles.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals, videos embedded from YouTube)
Back in the Late Permian, 258 to 252 million years ago, there was a family of gliding lizards called Weigeltisauridae whose fossils have been found in Germany, Britain, Russia and Madagascar. Europeans drew them as dragons.
Today there are still gliding lizards on Earth but they are smaller and live in Asian jungles. Dracos can glide 100+ feet from tree to tree by extending their long skin-covered ribs.
They reached this number by combining studies from thousands of researchers around world whose reports span a century. Dedicated ant researchers count ants by literally trapping them or by sweeping them up in leaf litter and counting what they’ve found. Their counts were combined and extrapolated to reach the 20 quadrillion estimate.
Some of you are probably thinking: Wouldn’t we be better off without bugs? Actually, no. The insect apocalypse matters because bugs provide so many hidden benefits. They consume decayed matter, plant seeds, aerate the soil, pollinate plants and ultimately feed the larger organisms on earth. Their disappearance is especially dire for anything that directly eats insects and anything that eats the insect-eaters. Especially birds.
The decline of insects is one reason why birds have declined 29% in North America in the past 50 years. Hardest hit have been the insect eaters — swallows, swifts and nighthawks. In fact most songbirds feed insects (protein) to their young even if they eat fruits and seeds at other times of year.
Here are just a few of the birds that eat insects at least part of the time. Some of them may surprise you.
American redstart with insect (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Mountain bluebird with insect (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Barn swallow bringing insect to feed its young (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Olive-sided flycatcher with insect (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
American kestrel about to eat a dragonfly (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
But when its wings are closed it looks like a leaf, shown at top.
Touch the “leaf” and it comes alive as an orange oakleaf butterfly (Kallima inachus).
Kallima inachus, the orange oakleaf, is a butterfly found in Tropical Asia. With wings closed, it closely resembles a dry leaf with dark veins and is a spectacular and commonly cited example of camouflage https://t.co/Gni6zCMGpn [source of the gif: https://t.co/RSSUeIGwJx] pic.twitter.com/fiooNzm2hZ
When baby spiders (spiderlings) disperse and when lightweight species really want to go places they wait for a light wind and electrically charged air. When conditions are right they stand on a high exposed spot on extended legs, tip up their back ends, and eject several gossamer threads from their spinnerets.
The silk automatically forms a lightweight triangular shaped parachute and, because its electrical charge matches the ground and is opposite to the air, it’s repelled from below and pulled into the sky. The gossamer parachute rises up and away and drags the spider with it. And he’s off! Flying backwards thanks to static electricity.
This action, called ballooning, can carry an individual spider at least 1,000 miles on a light wind and two to three miles above the earth (10,500-16,000 feet). The spider can stay airborne over open ocean and thus colonize an island.
Not all spiders go ballooning but the species that do, like the trashline orbweaver (Cyclosa turbinata) pictured at top, have quite a wide distribution.
How can you tell that tiny spiders have been flying? When you see lots of spider silk clinging to branches in a light breeze you’ve found the aftermath of a mass ballooning event.
Ever since spotted lanternflies (Lycorma delicatula) made their disgusting appearance this July in Pittsburgh we’ve been crushing and smashing them, but it’s clear that we humans can barely make a dent in the population. Most of the bugs fly way above our heads and land high in the trees. We can’t reach them but someone else can.
Spotted lanternflies are completely new to North America’s native species, but the bugs look like food so Nature is stepping in to eat them. Predation results are far more successful than our smashing.
Who eats spotted lanternflies? You can see their photos in the Creative Commons licensed iNaturalist group: Spotted Lanternfly Predation in the U.S. Most entries are from New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia. (Hey, Pittsburgh, post yours too!) Here are just a few examples.
Below, a great crested flycatcher eats a spotted lanternfly in Central Park, NYC. This photo was also tweeted by its author Hector Cordero (@CorderoNature).
UPDATE 18 Sep 2022, this post has attracted many new readers & commenters and has prompted this NOTE TO COMMENTERS –> Comments on this blog are moderated. If you post a comment that is profane or could inflame others, I will edit it or delete it.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons and iNaturalist; click on the captions to see the originals)
Dung beetles coexist with large animals because their entire life cycle depends on the droppings of cattle, elephants and other mammals. When Scarabaeus beetles find a dung pile each one makes a ball and uses its hind legs to roll the ball away from competitors, then buries it in a private location for later consumption. Here a sacred scarab beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) rolls and digs.
To move a dung ball the Scarabaeus beetle travels backwards in a straight line against all obstacles. When the ball rolls off course, the beetle climbs to the top, reorients itself and resumes pushing in the correct direction. This so impressed the Ancient Egyptians that they venerated the sacred dung beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) and carved amulets in its image(*).
And a 2019 study found that they also pay attention to the wind when the sun is too high to help. See “(Not only) the wind shows the way.”
Traveling upside down and backwards requires lots of navigational tools.
(*)p.s. Did you know that the sacred dung beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, is the origin of scarab jewelry?
The scarab (kheper) beetle was one of the most popular amulets in ancient Egypt because the insect was a symbol of the sun god Re. … The scarab forms food balls out of fresh dung using its back legs to push the oversized spheres along the ground toward its burrow. The Egyptians equated this process with the sun’s daily cycle across the sky, believing that a giant scarab moved the sun from the eastern horizon to the west each day, making the amulet a potent symbol of rebirth.
When we say that a bird has “moth-like flight” do we mean that its wings move like this? Check out Dr. Adrian Smith’s fifteen moths in slow motion flight.
The Glorious Scarab Beetle (Chrysina gloriosa) pictured at top was hiding underground when gardening unearthed it in its native US range of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.
Hidden gems include Beyer’s scarab which I saw in southeastern Arizona in 2015, described in this vintage article: Like a Jewel.
Beyer’s Scarab Beetle (Chrysina beyeri) at Carr Canyon, Arizona, 30 July 2015 (photo by Kate St. John)
In the eastern US we have beautiful scarab beetles in our own backyards.
