In this Spot on Science, Margaret meets some dung beetles and entomologist Nicole Gunter from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who shares with us the unique qualities of the bugs and their impact on the environment.
Class Discussion Questions:
1) Why are dung beetles important to an ecosystem?
2) Dung beetles got their name based on their lifestyle. Rename the dung beetle choosing a more appealing name. Justify your new name.
Read the Script:
[Margaret] Normally, finding a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe is super embarrassing. No one even wants to be associated with going to the bathroom. What, go to the bathroom? Me? No, never!
Insects, on the other hand, aren't so shy. Dung beetles, especially, enjoy cuddling up with the stinky stuff. Now, before you run away screaming, I met a scientist who studies the buggies in all their environmental glory.
PhD researcher Nicole Gunter is an entomologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. An entomologist is a scientist who specializes in the study of insects. Nicole has even described more than 50 new insects, jumping spiders, parasites, and dung beetles. And she's made some huge finds about the evolution of beetles.
Watch out, because she may just convince you that poo-loving creatures are cool. I invited her to the studio to talk about her work. But I started by asking her how she got interested in entomology. Take a look.
[Nicole] Well, it started as a kid. So, I grew up with lots of forest around my house, and every day I would just go out into the backyard and look at nature and what was around me. So, there was always lots of butterflies and flies and bees and beetles, and I was really curious about the diversity, all of the shapes, forms, and colors of beetles. They really were attractive to me.
[Margaret] Well, can you share a little bit about some of the guys you brought in today?
[Nicole] So, this is dung beetles. They get their common name for their association feeding and breeding with fecal matter, or the dung, of primarily mammals. So, what they do is they use their really cool antennae that they have to detect the smell of dung, and they either fly or walk towards the dung, which then they'll usually find a mate, and they'll collect a proportion of dung to make a ball out of, which they'll eventually lay their egg in, and in that bowl, a single larva, which is the grub or the juvenile of the dung beetles will develop. It's a really neat and safe strategy to ensure that your offspring survive.
And you can see here from the dung beetles that I've brought, they come in various shapes and sizes, and they have really cool ornamentation, like a lot of the males have these neat horns that they use as a sexual display to attract a different mate. And you can see some of the largest ones would fit in the size of your palm, but then the tiniest ones, on the bottom corner, they're even smaller than the eye of the biggest one.
[Margaret] So, tell me a little bit about the ones that don't get as much recognition, 'cause I was surprised when you said that we've got dung beetles in Ohio.
[Nicole] Yes. So, there are actually more species of dung beetles than there are mammals. Most of them are in this smaller size range here, so you might not see them that often in nature. And a lot of them are black or brown, so unless you're specifically poking around through poop, looking at them, they might be unnoticed.
So, like you were saying, we do have approximately 10 species here in Ohio, and most of them are pretty small. So we've got this little one here, the scooped scarab. It's really common in Ohio, and a few more in this case are also found here. We even have some of these really beautiful rainbow scarabs here in Ohio, but you might not see them so regularly.
[Margaret] I do see a lot of different colors here. There's like blue and green and orange. What do those colors do for the bugs?
[Nicole] So, that's a really interesting question. While they're really distinct and bright and brilliant to human eyes, a lot of scientists think that the predators that would potentially eat dung beetle adults, like birds and reptiles, might not be able to see these same brilliant colors. So, what stands out to us as being bright and reflective might actually camouflage really well for the dung beetles.
[Margaret] Ah. And you said, what I think is interesting, you might think dung beetle like, ew, that's gross, like let's get rid of them. But you said they're really important for the environment. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[Nicole] Yeah, so dung beetles provide critical ecosystem services, in particular in nutrient recycling. So you can imagine the composition of dung is almost like a fertilizer. And as part of their biology, they're burying these dung balls in tunnels under the soil. So, through building these tunnels, they're aerating the soil, which increases water retention in the soil.
Once the dung beetle emerges, still parts of that dung ball are left under the ground in that tunnel, so it's a fertilizer at the same time. So it increases soil quality, because they have better aeration, fertilization, and water retention. It makes the pastures and soil grow better.
And at the same time, by burying some of the dung, it reduces parasite transmission for anything like worms or protozoan parasites that could be transmitted in dug. So, they're really critical for the ecosystem and often go underappreciated in nature.
[Margaret] Yeah, definitely. Wow. So many facts that I didn't know. And can you tell me a little bit about, so, for someone who might be interested in becoming a scientist like you, what advice do you have?
[Nicole] Don't give up. You don't have to be the smartest person in your class to be a scientist. Science isn't about memorizing facts. It's about a curiosity. And just keep on asking questions if you're interested in something. It might not be known to science yet, so if you ask those questions and you follow your passion, you'd end up being a really successful scientist.
[Margaret] Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming in.
[Nicole] Thank you very much for letting me share my passion about dung beetles.
