There are a whole lot of unsavory lifestyles in the animal kingdom. The pearlfish has to swim up sea cucumber butts to escape predation. All manner of birds must fly thousands and thousands of miles each year with the change of the seasons. And hyenas have to deal with giving birth through their six-inch-long clitorises.

But no lifestyle is as lowly as that of the dung beetle, which spends its days digging through turds, molding the stuff into balls, and rolling them around. It eats the stuff (and is therefore described as coprophagous, which is a fun little vocab word you'd probably never see on the SAT). It relies on the stuff to develop its young. And this makes it all the more incredible that humans once revered the dung beetle, from the ancient Egyptians to a 17th-century Jesuit who compared Christ to the bug. These folks got a whole lot wrong about the dung beetle and made some pretty fantastical assumptions, but it turns out that their reverence was totally justified. The dung beetle may live its life in crap, but it’s actually a far more remarkable creature than you think.

There are some 6,000 species of dung beetles found on every continent save for Antarctica, where there really isn’t much poo to go around. They come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, from the 4-inch-long Goliath beetle, one of the world’s biggest insects, to the smaller but much more famous scarab beetle, which was worshiped by the ancient Egyptians and villainized in the movie The Mummy, though in fairness they did eat Beni, and he was a bit of a schmuck.

The solar deity Khepri had the face of a dung beetle, because like the insect rolls its turds, so too did the god roll the sun across the sky every day. Oh and also one of his parents was probably a dung beetle. Wikimedia

And just as they vary in looks, so too have they adopted a wide range of techniques for how best to live off of crap. Some find a pile of dung and simply dig in. Others tunnel below the pile, establish a nest, and dig upwards every now and again for a snack. Still others grab chunks and drag them away with their rearmost legs.

But the classic image of the dung beetle is one awkwardly rolling a ball of poop several times its size. To form these balls, they slash away at the dung with their chisel-like heads, which vary in shape from species to species (one kind of dung beetle in Peru has forsaken eating poo in favor of using its chisel to decapitate millipedes). Sculpting and shaping with their legs until it has an impressively spherical package, the beetle will then plant its head and front legs into the dirt and begin pushing the prize along with its back legs.

It’s this behavior that captured the imaginations of the ancient Egyptians. According to entomologist Yves Cambefort in his essay “Beetles as Religious Symbols,” the scarab, so reasoned the Egyptians, rolls the turd along and disappears it, just as the sun emerges and vanishes every day. Thus does their solar god Khepri, a humanoid figure with the face of a dung beetle, roll the star across the sky, bury it at sunset, and dig it back up at the eastern horizon at dawn—all while wearing some pretty expensive sunscreen, we’re to assume.

Oddly enough, these critters do indeed have impressive celestial powers. Dung beetles like the scarab are incredible navigators that actually use the sun as guidance when moving their quarries. Rolling the dung ball along, the beetle will periodically stop, climb atop its prize, look around to orient itself, and climb back down and start pushing the ball once more.

It’s all a matter of efficiency. Because it’s never just one beetle to one pile of doo-doo, the beetles need to move quickly with their goods or risk assault. They’ll viciously fight over poo balls and, hilariously, launch each other off of them like wrestlers flinging one another out of the ring, as David Attenborough describes in the video below. So by using the sun as a reference point instead of landmarks on the ground, the dung beetle can guarantee a hasty escape by following a perfectly straight path to a burrow, instead of wandering around wasting time. (Forget “as the crow flies.” It should be “as the dung beetle rolls.”)

But their powers of navigation get even wilder. When the sun goes down, the dung beetles can use the moon to navigate. But what if there’s no moon? In 2013 scientists went out on a moonless night and put little hats on some beetles to obscure their vision and discovered, rather incredibly, that the critters are using the Milky Way to orient themselves, the only known instance in the animal kingdom. Without the hats, individuals navigated perfectly fine. Strap an adorable little hat on a dung beetle, though, and it stumbles around like a drunkard.

So perhaps the dung beetle is more of a solar deity than even the Egyptians reckoned. But beyond the lovely religious symbolism and all that, the Egyptians were certainly mistaken about the dung beetle’s methods of reproduction. They reckoned, according to Cambefort, that the dung ball was fashioned by the male scarab to function as an egg, so the fellas actually had no need for ladies. They simply injected their semen into the dung and went about their business.

If you were an ancient Egyptian, you probably would have carried around a scarab beetle amulet like this, which signified life. Mine probably would have been a different color, though, because this one would have clashed with my eyes. Wikimedia

Because of this strange life cycle, the scarab was not only a symbol of the sun for the Egyptians, but of life itself: An old beetle disappears underground and emerges anew as a youngster. Accordingly, they obsessively adorned themselves with scarab amulets in both life and death. Indeed, according to Cambefort, hundreds of thousands of these artifacts have been excavated in Egypt.

This Egyptian notion of beetle birth is actually an idea reminiscent of the exceedingly wrong theory of spontaneous generation, which in the West originated with the ancient Greeks and held sway until Louis Pasteur debunked it in the 19th century (even farther back, the Babylonians thought worms generated from canal mud). The thinking went that some critters simply appear on their own, no sex required. One 17th-century chemist, for instance, claimed you could make mice out of wheat and sweaty shirts, and scorpions out of basil placed between two bricks. But why the hell you’d want to do either is beyond me.

The Egyptians got the idea of female-less beetle sex from watching the young emerge from buried dung. Male and female beetles will often roll away the dung ball together, dig a nice hole for it, drop it in, and cover it. Below ground, the female will rework the dung into the shape of a pear, leaving the top hollow, where she inserts her eggs. When the larvae hatch, they have more than enough to eat, eventually pupating before emerging into the light of day.

Dung beetles vary in the shape of their face shovels, which they use to slice off bits of crap. Ah, the glories of evolution. François Michonneau/Wikimedia

And it’s this behavior that makes the dung beetle so pivotal to so many ecosystems. This is especially true among the great herds of Africa, which drop a staggering amount of plops. Dung beetles are more than happy to pick up little bits and roll them around, distributing fertilizer more evenly among the plains. Burying the droppings also has the added benefit of removing a food supply for flies, helping to keep their populations in check.

Thus the humble dung beetle is entirely deserving of the worship it received from the ancient Egyptians. Even the Greeks put it on a throne, claiming it was the king of the mythical pygmies—a race of tiny peoples at constant war with cranes (the birds, not the machinery)—and went so far as to associate it with Zeus, according to Cambefort. Later on in the 1600s, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher claimed that the line from King David’s speech in Psalm 22:6 invoking Jesus’ lamentations on the cross, “But I am a worm, and no man,” could be read as “scarab” instead of “worm.” Also an alchemist, Kircher believed that the scarab was the prima materia, a substance required to create the philosopher's stone that supposedly could turn metals like silver and iron into gold.

So, no, dung beetles don’t roll the sun across the sky or reproduce without sex or rule over tiny humans, and they sure get hassled for their lifestyle these days. But the world would be a whole lot smellier without them. So here’s to you, lords of poo. They see you rollin’, they hatin’, tryin’ to catch you ridin’ dirty.

Reference:

Cambefort, Y. (1993) Beetles as Religious Symbols. Cultural Entomology Digest, Issue 1