Dung beetle

One summer I was walking through a patch of desert near Dubai’s border with Al Ain.

I came across a camel shed. There I saw a huge beetle wrestling with a ball-like thing, similar in size, rolling over an undulating mini-dune. It was a dung beetle or scarab beetle (also called just scarab).

The beetle got its name from its habit of surviving on the dung of herbivores such as camel, cattle, sheep, goat, gazelle, deer, donkey, horse, hare, etc.

It was great fun watching the beetle make a ball out of dung and rolling it at great speed. Usually, the beetle buries the ball when it finds suitable soft and wet soil or sand — that too in a great hurry.

Sometimes a female helps in rolling the ball. After burying it, the male mates with the female. She then lays a single egg in one smaller ball rolled out from the original one. She then puts a layer of glue to prevent it from drying up. The larva feeds on the wet ball in which it was born and develops into a baby beetle.

Dung beetles do a great service to the soil by adding manure to it through the conversion of dung into bio-degradable material. They also help in ploughing the field, thereby allowing oxygen into the soil.

American scientists estimate that they help save $2 two billion annually by adding fertilisers to crop fields.