There’s more than one way to catch a dung beetle. You can shovel dung pads into buckets with holes in the bottom and wait for the beetles to burrow their way through the fragrant pie, collecting them as they drop through the holes. Or you can simply dig through fresh piles of manure, picking out any beetles going about their business. “We do that with gloves, but it still stinks a lot,” says entomologist Bruno Buzatto of the University of Western Australia. “But you learn to ignore that.”
The malodorous method yields Buzatto and his colleagues 400 or 500 Onthophagus taurus dung beetles a day, plenty for breeding in his lab to study dimorphism: the divergence of male adult beetles into two possible forms. O. taurus is the strongest beetle in the world, with some males capable of pulling 1,141 times their own body weight. These brawny males are of ...
