A Chinese dung beetle can be sold for less than two dollars in Australia? Because dung beetles are also picky eaters

An initial population of 1,500 Chinese dung beetles can be sold for around $400 in Australia, which means the price of a dung beetle is close to two dollars.

Can dung beetles be so valuable? There is a reason for this. To sum it up in one sentence, dung beetles are also picky eaters. Dung beetles are not a kind of insect that people like, but they are one of the most indispensable insects on earth. Why? Because without dung beetles, the earth's environment is likely to become a mess. Let's think about how many land creatures have appeared on the earth since the birth of life, and how much feces these land creatures have excreted. If no one comes to deal with these feces, it will be an unimaginable scene.

So, dung beetles have a very long history on Earth? Indeed, they do.

Although there is no direct fossil evidence to prove when dung beetles appeared on Earth, scientists have sequenced the genes of a large number of beetles and extrapolated the evolution rate of genetic differences between species. They can roughly lock the time of dung beetle appearance to 115 million years ago. 115 million years ago? That was the age of dinosaurs. Yes, the first objects served by dung beetles were probably dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were huge and had a large appetite, so naturally, they excreted a lot. If there were no dung beetles to provide them with excrement shoveling services, the environment in the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods would have been stinking.

Is feces really that powerful?

Without dung beetles, is the natural environment helpless against dung? This is indeed the case. As we all know, Australia's animal husbandry is very developed, but what you may not know is that Australians were once tortured by cow dung. At the end of the 18th century, after Europeans set foot on Australia, they quickly turned it into a super ranch, and the number of cattle increased rapidly. At first, everyone was full of confidence in the future, but it didn't take long for problems to arise.

With tens of millions of cows, tens of millions of tons of cow dung are produced every day. The biggest beneficiaries of the rapid development of Australia's animal husbandry are not the immigrants, but the flies. Many immigrants cannot stand the annoyance of the flies and have to lock themselves up at home.

Why is it like this? Don't Australia have dung beetles? Of course there are dung beetles in Australia, and not only in Australia, but also in every place in the world except Antarctica, because there is no place that does not need to shovel dung. However, the presence of dung beetles does not mean that they can handle cow dung. There is a saying that goes, a person's experience determines who he is. In the same way, the living environment of a dung beetle determines what kind of dung beetle it is.

For a long time, Australian dung beetles have been fed with the feces of marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas. The feces of these animals are fibrous and granular, which is very different from the large piles of cow dung.

On the one hand, it was because the amount of cow dung was too large, and on the other hand, it was because cow dung did not suit the taste of Australian dung beetles. What could they do? They could only import dung beetles from abroad. Soon Australia imported a large number of dung beetles from South Africa and Europe, and the environmental problems caused by cow dung were quickly solved. So recently, Australia is still importing dung beetles from other regions, including China, because China's Shennong dung beetle is an expert in handling cow dung.

Although the eating habits of dung beetles are related to the environment in which they live, in general, their dietary preferences tend to be similar.

For humans, the biggest role of dung beetles may be to process cow dung on pastures, which makes us mistakenly believe that dung beetles like cow dung the most, but this is not the case. In 2021, scientists trapped more than 9,000 dung beetles of 15 species for research and found that dung beetles are more interested in the feces of omnivores than herbivores, and among all omnivores, human and chimpanzee feces are their favorites. Who would have thought that dung beetles are so important to the natural environment, and who would have thought that they would be picky about eating feces.

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