Meet a Beautiful Beetle That Loves to Eat Poop | National Geographic

I turned a bison patty around and suddenly I've seen this sparkling emerald under the bison patty, and I didn't expect it. If you find a horny beetle, it's always a male. The rainbow scarabs are amongst the most beautiful of beetles; they are not the largest, but if you see that shiny exoskeleton, this green emerald shiny beetle in the sunlight, it's just so amazing that a beetle that lives in poop all of its life is so pretty. The dung beetle found here in Colorado is very poor; it's impoverished.

So, in the old times, we had 60 million bison on the Great Plains. They were eradicated in the late 1800s. When we had 60 million bison, they pooped over 600 million times a day, 365 days a year. That was a lot of poop, so there were certainly a lot of dung beetles. A rich dung beetle fauna? Well, if you go out there and look under a bison patty, you should do that. Just take one, turn it around. You see there are very few dung beetles.

Oh, here's a wonderful fresh piece of bison poop out here in a dry area with a lot of wind. The poop builds a crust almost immediately, like this what you see. So you can touch it with your finger, and the finger is still clean because it's dry. Lots of people don't think about that; a small group of insects have a serious effect on our environment or on their livelihoods. But, um, they do. They're very efficient recyclers of dung, of poop.

If you have lots of those beetles, that is a wonderful way to maintain soil quality because you want to have fertile soil in the natural grassland. It's very tedious actually to pick all the dung beetles out in the field. So what we do, we collect the dung in a bucket, take it home, and float it. The dung sinks to the ground, but all the beetles float on top. It's just interesting.

All these brown ones that I'm collecting right now, they haven't been in Colorado 20 years ago. They just came in in the last 10 to 15 years, and now they are everywhere and probably the most common species of dung beetles in the state. The rainbow scarab beetle is very, uh, rare. We found probably 15 to 20 amongst 880,000 specimens we found in the last 8 years in our beetle project.

What we want to study is if you bring a bison herd back into an area. We started that 8 years ago when a small bison herd was brought to a PLS Conservation Center site. Does this have an effect on the dung beetle fauna? Does it regenerate? Do the native dung beetles become more abundant? During these 8 years, they had about 40 bison on the site. Now they have changed to over 300, 350 bison, and we will see if that changes the dung beetle fauna more dramatically.

I've never found anybody who was not fascinated by these beetles until I told them that's a dung beetle. Then they were, uh, well, a little bit irritated because people think dung beetles are ugly and little and brown and stinky. That is a wonderful pretty jewel of a beetle. [Music]