Dung Beetles: The Poop-Rolling Stargazers of the Serengeti | IN OUR NATURE
Out here in the Wild West at the Serengeti, its no place for the weak,
you might strike it rich, but watch your thorax. There's bandits everywhere. Ready
to steal what you worked hard for I'm not talking about gold. I'm talking about poop.
What is happening?
I can explain guys. I brought a story today about one of my all-time,
favorite subjects. You're not going to believe what this is.
Oh my God. I also brought a story about one of my all-time, favorite subjects.
Same time one, two, three, extreme senses.
Extreme senses.
How long did it take you to practice that one?
I was born this way. Oh, you mean counting to three? I've been doing that for a long time.
Emily. I think you're going to like this for a completely different reason
because of where our story starts.
It's amazing an ecosystem as rich and diverse as the Serengeti,
you know what the most important valuable resource in this entire ecosystem is?
One is right here.
Steaming hot pile, fresh elephant dump.
I'm intrigued.
Ah, It's a beautiful sight.
It is. I mean, how fresh do you think this is.
within the hour?
Yeah. Do you reckon?
Ew. What is he doing.
Okay, we'll talk about that later. I have a little hand sanitizer in my bag.
I mean, I can tolerate a lot of gross stuff, but even I have my limit.
So The number one cool thing that we saw that day was this awesome Bull Elephant. And the
number two coolest thing we saw that day was that number two. I mean, elephants impressive at both
ends. It got to tell ya, but we also, weren't the only ones who found that special Present.
I mean, this is swarming. It's swarming with flies
ants. Like every bug in the Serengeti, I feel like has found this pile of poop,
it was incredible just how quickly they came onto this ploy.
Within like minutes, this hitting the ground, they were here.
I mean, if you consider just how nutrient rich it is, and then almost a broken down form,
the dung beetles they'll make a nice bowl of it and kind of rode it off to they burrow in and
lay their eggs in it.
You can just roll with us.
Are you in the dung beetle fan club?
Yeah. Dung beetles are the best. They're the best can confirm.
This is like a, like a stinky gold rush, finding a pilot poo liked this. I mean,
there's water nutrients and these is crucial stuff in a place like this, where competition
for resources can be so fierce, right? And these beetles, they battled brutally on this
bounty from a [inaudible 00:03:00]. It's a brutal bounty beetle battle.
There's battles going on this dung pile of beetles,
fighting other beetles to get the best spot with the freshest wettest, elephant poop,
and who wouldn't want to fight over this. We should watch our backs. There might be
other people out here with cameras that want this pile [crosstalk 00:03:18] .
You know, this is valuable stuff. So
These dung beetles scoop their shovel like heads through this stinky motherload
gathering armfuls of poop, like farmers harvesting their crops
and then using their incredibly muscular legs to mold and mash it into a ball.
Perfect for rolling home. But you got to get home fast because other beetles, they want that dung.
Watch out for Beetle, dung bandits.
So here is the problem. These dung beetles have to solve.
How do they find the quickest route home in the straightest line?
You know, that's a really good question because
we're surrounded by tall grass. So how do you know which way to go?
Yeah. I mean to us, grass is only knee or waist high, but to a dung beetle,
it's like being stuck in the forest. There are no landmarks. I mean, I would be totally lost.
Humans are actually famously bad at this. You drop people in the wilderness with no
navigational aids. They'll just walk around in circles. Figuring a straight
path. Home is really hard unless.
Obviously they carry teeny-tiny campuses.
Actually.
But I mean, if you look up and some things that you can use to navigate.
like a universal compass.
Exactly.
So their eyes they're super tiny, right? But they are highly specialized for picking up the
position and the height of the sun in the sky. And it gets even better. If the sun is hidden,
like it's behind a cloud or something, their eyes can even pick up on patterns of polarized light,
like how light waves spin. And they can even use that
for navigation. That's going to be the most Unique astronomy skill I've ever heard.
Poop navigation.
Poop navigation, well done. Dung beetles, poop navigators, smelly astronomers.
They push for a little bit, head down, legs kicking. Then they pop up on top of
their dung ball and they do this little dance turning around to sense the pattern of light
got their directions back down, push, pop up, dance, navigate, push, dance, navigate,
and just keep repeating that all the way home. It's so cute. And they're very Good at it.
I never thought I would say this about a beetle that literally spends its whole life
push a poop around, but that's pretty cute and dance like me at a wedding.
These beetles are super strong. I mean, those have dung balls could
be like 50, a 100 times their body weight. I don't care. Push it right up a mountain.
They never skipped leg day or exoskeleton day.
What's the equivalent of a hundred times
our body weight. If we were like pushing around a couple of trucks,
But now tell me, so you've got these species that are active during the day,
but you also have species of dung people that are active at night.
Ooh, good question, turning the tables on you, Mr. Scientist.
It is a good question. So there are other species of dung beetles that are only active
at night. I mean, dung harvesting is a 24 hour business. Okay? But these beetles,
this is going to blow your mind.
They're doing the same thing, but they're just using different cues from the sky. They actually
see the Milky way. They use the band of the Milky way
through the sky as a way to orient themselves back to their burrows. Absolutely incredible.
Wait, do they actually see the stars?
So their eyes are probably too small to actually see the individual stars,
but get this scientists actually put dung beetles inside of a planetarium.
And they realized that they were using the band of the Milky way in the sky to navigate
Home. I would not want to clean the carpet at the planetarium after that visit,
I would want to narrate the show.
Do you think there are astrologists.
Reading a constellations?
Yeah.
Poop is in Leo today. I'm more of a Gemini poop guy.
Scientists have done all kinds of hilarious and creative things to figure this out. I mean,
blindfolding dung beetles, like putting mirrors around them,
putting them planetariums. This is crazy.
I Want to see the blindfold, honestly. That's amazing.
I mean, they're like a little like index card cutouts. They like taped to their
heads. It's a ridiculous,
Do they need any interns? Because I am there.
Sign her up. We know it might be a little weird, but we've uncovered something so
cool out of it. I mean, this is the only insect that I know of that can see our galaxy. I mean,
that's wild, but I think it's a really cool connection there. Evolution frickin rules.
Totally does.
Dude evolution.
All I need in life is a big ball of poo and some sick waves. I
Don't have any brothers, but I feel like working
with you guys is the closest I've ever been to having experienced.
I'm sorry.
I feel kind of like, like touched by that
They may live in poop, but these are amazing little creatures.
Galaxy Gazing beetles. Incredible. But they aren't the only bugs
that can sense things at the edge of what is physically possible. These bugs are straight fire.
Do the kids still say that Trace?
I don't Know if that's what the kids say. I'm not cool, but fire is cool.
And to understand what I'm talking about, we got to go to Berkeley, California.
It's not often that you are alone in a giant stadium all by yourself.
Some say it's haunted.
Echo. So, In the early 1940s, this stadium was here. It looked exactly the same as it
does now. Still have the bleachers still have the field, still had the trees up around it.
Out of those trees is where our story starts. It's like hearing my own voice inside my own head.
So picture this, It's the 1940s. You're having a great time. You're here with your friends,
enjoying yourself. And then all of a sudden out of the trees, you hear this giant swarm and you don't
know where it's coming from. And then they're everywhere and they're just bitting people.
But why would this happen? Because those beetles are fire chaser beetles or charcoal beetles.
Why would you let this? I need more information,
Fire beetles. What even is that?
They seek out burned wood as part of their natural life cycle. And even though
they swarmed Berkeley stadium in the 40's, they're still around today, biting people,
fighting wildfires and brush fires. And as to why they would descend on the stadium,
picture it like most places in the 1940s it's filled with people Smoking.
Oh, right? Like Humphrey Bogart. Let me tell you a kid there's beetles here.
They didn't teach me that in health class
Kids don't smoke. You're going to get attacked by a swarm of beetles.
Swarm of these fire Chaser Beetles descend upon the stadium. They're chasing the firesticks.
Okay, wait, do they like lay their eggs in fire? Like dragons or something?
I mean, kind of they're Called fire bugs or fire chasers because they literally
got to lay their eggs next to burning embers. The fire has wiped out all the competition in
an area. So like a YouTube comments section, the Beetles are there first
and their larva can eat the wood before any other competition gets there.
That is just so metal.
Yeah. And when I say swarm, I mean it, after a forest fire in Germany,
an area of three football fields was estimated to contain at least 300,000 larva.
What that's so extreme.
There first described by entomologists after brush fires and on oil fires,
but are also seen another hot places like walking on pipes that are too hot to touch
in sugar factories and on logs that are smoldering after campfires, they get so hot from their
escapades that their little tiny bodies, if they land on human skin can cause burns.
What that's like super extreme.
It's incredible story. And it really got us intrigued one. How did they know that all these
people were here smoking? Could they sense it? And two, could they sense the heat that
was coming from those cigarettes? Or was it just the smoke? It might be that they could do both.
So I popped across the bay into San Francisco to find Out. So we're here at the California Academy
of Sciences. They're going to show us some fire chaser beetles that they have in their specimen
archives, But on my way to meet up with our expert, I, to Joe found my way to Africa.
Ah, this is going to be great.
Ooh. Okay, Mr. Cool.
The animals were really Easy to take pictures with very still. It was, you know, done this before.
Zebras, Joe. You're not the only one who got to see wildlife, new kill that's why? What are you
doing up there? Kitty cat, Joe going all the way to Tanzania. You didn't get this close, Joe. Wow.
So pretty. I think I caught this one in animal crossing. Whoa. Hi.
Very funny. Probably smelled better too. Whatever.
Eventually I met up with Christopher Grantor, the collection manager of entomology.
So how many species are down here? This is huge.
We have hundreds of Thousands of species in the collections
with over 15 million insects from all over the world.
That is wild. These are cool. I need one of these for my house. Where are our beetles?
We've got them right here.
Whoa. This is so cool.
These little guys and are a variety of different colors.
Some are black, some have spots. Some are iridescent green.
They are so small. I guess I didn't expect something so powerful to be so tiny.
How Far away can they sense fire?
Well, Actually that was the question that I
asked the entomologists because we had them in the Hot seat.
I get it.
Tell me Everything. How do these beetles do their thing?
Well, they, they Have an amazing ability
to sense fires from a huge distance away. And they do that with several sensory structures,
The Beetles can sense smoke in the air with their antennae and they have tiny sensors on the sides
of their bodies under the wings that let them sense infrared radiation from heat. And these are
incredible. They're basically little fluid covered hairs in a pocket. The fluid expands and contracts
with the heat. And they sense that and follow the sensation. It's not too dissimilar to how we have
fluid covered hairs in our ears telling us which way is up, but there's this way cooler or hotter.
So as they fly the sensory pits, they kind of face forward so that they're able to triangulate
the smoke in the fire in the distance and make a B to align for it. But it's a balancing act.
They want to get there soon enough to beat the competition, but not so soon that they
waste energy flying around and waiting for the fire to die down. They want to land on
charred wood, not wood, that's on fire. And that is a life or death decision
if they do it right, they breed. And if they do it wrong, they get cooked. Just like with
the dung beetles, these extreme senses are all about resources, passing on genes and breeding.
Yeah. So as soon as those eggs are laid on or under the bark, the little larva will emerge from
the egg and burrow into the wood and they'll spend the next year feeding on the inside of the tree.
So They get like a little buffet.
Exactly.
Wow. That's nice. Very romantic. So then like a little smoldering wood, you know, a little wine.
Yeah. They'll mature slowly throughout the year and in the spring or summer of the next year,
they'll emerge and be ready to look for the next forest fire.
How these beetles detect fire from far away is still being studied by scientists,
working on biomimicry. These are people who base technological inventions on things
invented by nature. If the studies are right, these beetles beat every human technological
IR detector on the market, in terms of sensitivity, they have been spotted in fires,
a hundred kilometers. It's from their homes.
Wait, that's like 62 miles. Something that small.
Yes. Thank you. It's like me standing in
England and sensing a fire across the English channel in Northern France.
There is a fire in Normandy. I should go there. Lay some eggs in it.
We're talking radio telescope level sensitivity. This detection
is at the limit of what is physically possible though. I should say, entomologists are still
debating the exact distances and how they do it. More research is needed as I like to say,
but I have one last point. Dung and fire have a lot in common because neither are super pleasant,
but both are an important part of the ecosystem. And both are examples
of where there's a resource to be exploited, be it energy or nutrients or water or shelter
for your babies, or, you know, whatever that is. There's usually something that's
evolved to take advantage of that resource, no matter how rare it is,
That's especially true where there's competition, right? I mean these extreme senses, they evolved
and let these species do what they do better than any of their competitors out there. Right? I mean,
without dung and without fire, they couldn't do what they do in their little beetle Lives.
You could say without those resources, they would have a hard day's night.
Oh, that was a beetle joke.
You can get it cause the beetle with an a, but instead of the double e.
They're working overtime.
It's been an arduous Twilight and I've been toiling...
I think we got a future in Liverpool.
