Figure 14.

Standing on his hands and rolling a ball of herbivore dung with his hind legs, a male dung beetle in East Africa courts a female in the process, who rides along on the ball. At some point he decides to start digging, and the party disappears slowly down the hole, to a depth of several feet. Once there the female deposits one or more eggs in the dung, now safe from predators. Dung beetles are unsung heroes of nutrient recycling and soil turnover in the tropics. We wear them on our body in the form of scarab jewelry.