Newsflash: Dung Beetles use the Milky Way.

...wow, that title sounds dirty. If you're too young to have a mind that goes to the gutter, don't worry about what I just said. Just know that almost everything in nature has an amazing sense of navigation compared to the silly humans who use Google Maps.  Like the sailors of old, they often use the stars as a sort of natural map. It turns out that this holds true for dung beetles as well.

Many animals, including birds and humans, use stars for navigation. This is  not the case for some creatures, like pigeons, who use the Earth's magnetic pull. Given that a little insect probably doesn't have great eyesight like birds and humans, it is mind-boggling to see one use the galaxy as a road map.



If Discovery News is correct, dung beetles don't just use the starry sky, but the Milky Way for navigating as they roll their dung balls. Even on a moonless night, a dung beetle will roll its ball of feces in a perfectly straight line. It was a mystery how they could do this without moonlight.

The experiment to test this went along these lines:

 "To test their navigation, researchers watched the beetles in a planetarium under a starry sky, a sky showing only the Milky Way, and an overcast sky. The beetles had no problem maintaining their straight lines under the first two skies, but couldn’t do it when the Milky Way was indistinguishable.

Most stars are probably too dim for the insects’ eyes, the researchers said in the study published online in Current Biology."

Hm. So along with making pyramids, the ancient Egyptians figured out that dung beetles rolled their balls of feces according to the heavens. Maybe they were onto something about scarabs being sacred. I wouldn't sacrifice an animal to that, though.

Creature Feature: Dung Beetles.

Animals do all sorts of weird things involving stuff that humans wouldn't touch. THis has largely to do with that animal's personal world - for example, urine is an excellent indicator of scent (and most of the animal world does see by scent) and rabbits eat their own droppings so as to eat the extra nutrients. It all makes sense in the animal's own view of the world.

That said, dung beetles must be one of the most baffling species in the world to humans. All dung beetles are scarabid beetles, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica.  Trying to name off every single species would be an exercise in futility. They eat and lay eggs in feces. Gross, right?

What's gross to us is really quite monumental in the beetle's own little world. Dung beetles are amazing. The dung balls that the beetles make are either a) massive food stores or b) nests made of quite a convenient material. The balls of feces they accumulate can be up to ten times their weight, so rolling one is like a single human pushing 6 buses full of people! Also, it's kind of funny that the males are usually the ones doing the rolling- make jokes about THAT at will.

It's a small world, after all.

This use of dung is quite a valuable service. Rolling the dung means rolling foul-smelling excrement away from whatever made it, refertilizing the soil and keeping pests away at the same time. Dung beetles save the U.S. cattle industry somewhere around 38 million dollars every year. Seriously, it's a good thing that somebody is handling the dung; we humans do not want to deal with it ourselves.

Finally, what would an entry on dung beetles be without at least mentioning ancient Egypt? The Egyptians, for all their pyramids, agricultural advances, and nifty inventions believed that the sun was rolled across the sky like a dung beetle rolling excrement. It was also believed that all dung beetles were male and that they reproduced by masturbating into a dung ball. We can understand falcons, ibises, crocodiles, and jackals being impressive. The dung beetles are actually pretty cool, too, but giving them the sun might be pushing it.

Creature Feature: Dim?!

Here in America, we will copyright and patent everything. Look at SOPA/PIPA; assuming they were legit acts and not brutal acts of the police state and NWO, even potentially having copyrighted material on a site would be enough to shut it down. There is even an insane person who attempted to patent the stick. Look it up; our culture is copyright crazy.

There was one instance, however, in which nature copied a copyrighted character. Mind, nature used a different color palette, but the point remains that the rhinoceros beetle Dim now has a real-life counterpart.



A Peruvian rhinoceros beetle, Megaceras briansaltini, sports a horn almost exactly like Dim from A Bug's Life. The resemblance is uncanny. No, the bug did not come first; it was discovered years after A Bug's Life was made. If Disney could sue nature for copyright laws, they probably would. The discovery of life copying art like this has been dubbed the "Dim effect" in the blue rhinoceros beetle's honor.

Horn aside, this bug looks like some sort of alien. That face should be on some sort of dragon-insect cross. It's Dim gone horribly, horribly wrong. He came to the dark side for the cookies and you know it!

Clearly the face of an evil mastermind.

Here's the kicker: We honestly do not know if this insect is an actual species or not. For all we know, that copyright-infringing horn was a fluke mutation. Cases like this are why it's really important to save biodiversity hotspots like rainforests, guys. The more species a place has, the better off it is ecologically. Plus, neat stuff like this happens. It's always cool when nature has the potential to drive copyrighters up the wall.

Who's That Pokemon? - #214 Heracross.

Heracross is one of the baddest bugs in the Pokemon world. It has massive ATK, the most powerful Bug-type attack in the game at its (STAB'd!) disposal and an ability that makes its ATK even more impressive. Its unique Bug/Fighting combination leaves it with few weaknesses. I have heard Heracross touted as one of the best Pokemon in the game since its introduction.

To make things even cooler, Heracross is based off of an actual beetle:



The rhinoceros beetle dubbed kabutomushi ("helmet bug") (Trypoxylus dichotomus or Allomyrina dichotoma, depending on who you ask) in Japan is the real-life basis for Heracross. They are found throughout Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea.

Like Heracross, the males of the species have spectacular horns with a cross-like growth on the end. They have been featured in every series that features monsters kicking each other's asses.


Including Mushiking, a game devoted entirely to fighting beetles. (Sorry, I couldn't find the rhino card.)

Also, like Heracross, these bugs are born to fight. In Japan, pitting one male unicorn beetle against another is as popular as fighting roosters and bettas, if not more so. This sport is enjoyed by children and adults alike, leading Japanese scientists to seek stronger, faster-growing beetles. People both lose and win a lot of money pitting one male beetle against another, but they are not difficult to procure at all; people either catch their own beetles or buy them at department stores for approximately 5-10 USD.


Boxed and ready for battle!

Want a real Heracross? Nintendo lies; it's not THAT hard to get one.

Creature Feature: Japanese Beetle.

Many of you probably know about the Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) thanks to the little nibbles on your trees, shrubberies, and flowers. You might have seen these guys in your weeds, wreckin' your yard. Yes, they are related to the rose chafer beetles that I want in a lucite clock (both are in the family Scarabaeidae), but these are far, far more annoying.

Japanese beetles are, however, very very pretty. Like the rose chafer, they have some metallic green parts. Their wing covers are bronze-orange, and the whole bug would make a nice jewelery piece. At the tips of their antennae are little three-fingered 'hands' that reach out to give the beetle a better sense of its surroundings. (Am I the only one who finds that image both creepy and adorable?) Also, yes, those are tufts of hair you see on the beetle's underside.

I could praise these little green and orange bugs all day. That would not stop me from luring them into a little plastic bag and drowning them. As beautiful as they may be, they are, like lionfish, a destructive invasive species. Though well-regulated in their native habitat (Japan), in America, they have become even more infectious than DDR. They predate upon 200-odd plant species, including quite a few that humans would like to keep around.

Come pick my roses! No, wait, NOT LIKE THAT!

Japanese beetles probably came into the U.S. in a shipment of iris bulbs before 1912. They were first spotted in a New Jersey nursery in 1916, and have spread their way across the U.S. (and even into Canada) ever since. The beetles' success has caused an increase in some bird populations, which causes the birds to be considered pests themselves. (Why no one has labeled humans as pests, I'll never know. Sorry, jaded again.)

Just a reminder of what these guys can do.

So, despite their beauty, feel free to drown them, smack them into walls, seal them into plastic blocks, fry them (hey, you never know, might be good), use them in chicken feed, or tear off their wing coverts and make a necklace out of them. Get a big enough one, preserve it, and brag that you have a lucky Egyptian scarab. You'll be doing the United States a great service.

Creature Feature: The Rose Chafer and Jung.

Some of you are probably wondering exactly what makes this beetle, the green rose chafer (Cetonia aurata), so special. It looks almost like a bigger Japanese beetle, only far less damaging to one's garden. As the video above demonstrates, they start life as part of nature's cleanup crew, and are native to Europe. Honestly, I did not even know that the green rose chafer existed until recently. It's a funny story.

In 2009, I went on a (crappy) trip to Kansas City. In Lawrence, the place where my cousin was going to college, there was a neat little shop that sold a bunch of nature-related things. They had dinosaur skeleton replicas, bug snacks, whole taxodermies of rattlesnakes, and a bunch of neat little gadgets and jewelery pieces with bugs inside. That's where I got my 'higurashi' necklace from. (Note: This was probably a misnomer on my part. Turns out that the 'higurashi' is a very specific type of Japanese cicada.)

Recently, I tried to rediscover the computer mice that I had found in that shop. On one of the first sites I came across, not only did they have the scorpion mouse I had seen, but had computer mice with lucite-preserved rose chafers in them. They were pretty green beetles, but, otherwise, seemed unimpressive.

Then I found out that Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, had had an interesting experience with one of these beetles:

"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."



Woah. That is creepy, cool, and utterly bizarre, all at the same time. A bug similar and related to the Egyptian scarab defied its natural habits in a 'speak of the devil' sort of way; I'd be more confident in my work as a spiritual psychologist if that happened to me, too!

Mind, the beetle in the computer mouse probably is not the exact same type of rose chafer; usually, Chinese bug preservers stick to oriental wildlife. An auction for what must be the most awesome clock ever cites a different insect entirely. One awesome thing still led to another.

There is no such thing as coincidence. The only thing is inevitability.

Why couldn't Jung have been this hot?
Thanks for the update, CLAMP!