What a Dung Beetle Actually Does in a Day
A single dung beetle can bury a ball of manure up to ten times its own body weight within twelve hours of locating it. Scarabaeidae, the family that includes most of India's dung beetle species, operate as tunnellers, rollers, and dwellers, each guild processing the pat differently but all arriving at the same outcome: the dung goes underground. Once buried, it fertilises soil, its moisture is retained by the earth rather than evaporated, and the surface of the pasture is cleared. In Australia, where native dung beetles could not process introduced cattle dung, the government ran a formal Dung Beetle Project from 1965 onward, importing species from South Africa and Europe to manage the problem. India has its own native beetle fauna and has never needed such an intervention, but that baseline is quietly eroding.
