Darrell the Stoical Dung Beetle--Part 2

No sooner does he utter these words, when the dung ball drops into a small depression. Damn! Darrell circles his poop globe again, and realizes that this will require a super dung beetle effort to get the ball rolling again. He returns to his post and digs in. He grunts and heaves and sweats—to no avail. Doug watches him struggle vainly for a few minutes, then ingratiatingly steps next to Darrell and they heave together. Whomp! The ball breaks free!

Darrell knows he’s in a fix now: he couldn’t have done it alone, and he knows he owes Doug something. Doug gazes at him with a shit-eating grin—exuding abundant pride at their achievement. Darrell doesn’t want to acknowledge Doug’s help. He knows that this scheming intruder, given an inch, will seize a mile. He can’t be trusted. Darrell also knows that if he sat down to rest and snoozed off even a few minutes, he’d awaken to find that Doug has stolen his treasure. Yet he also knows that he has to acknowledge and even appreciate Doug’s help. He can’t blow him off now. Still uncertain about what to do, he resumes his post and keeps on rolling—hoping against hope that Doug will get bored and wander off.

After a half-hour more of hard labor, Darrell pauses to look around—wondering where Doug is. He can’t see him lurking, licking his beetle lips, off to one side or the other. Has Doug gone? Could he be so lucky? Looking up, Darrell spots Doug squatting on top of the ball, as if having just won a round of “King of the Dung Hill.” Doug gaily waves down at him, saying, “I thought I’d ride up here and keep an eye out for other obstacles or dung bandits. I think we’re making good progress.”

Darrell grits his teeth (or at least his beetle mandibles), realizing he’s being toyed with. It’s the old dung-duping game: pretend to be helping roll the ball home, while you look for opportunities to snatch the ball for yourself. Losing patience and about to order the interloper down from his perch, Doug anticipates his mood change and whimpers, “Besides, I pulled a leg muscle on that last big heave we did. As soon as I rest a little more, I’ll be right down to help push.”

Darrell senses he’s been had. Doug’s declared injury stemmed from helping out. How can he tell him off now? He still doesn’t trust him, but what can he do? Once again, Darrell pushes off and the big ball reluctantly rolls on.

Will Darrell be forced to share his treasure with devious Doug? Will the shrewd interloper even succeed in purloining the prize all for himself, leaving poor Darrell empty footed? Will Darrell prevail and manage to shoo the pest away? We’ll leave our friends at this point in the story… regrettably leaving the reader hanging. Maybe it’ll be another day, another dung ball for stoical Darrell. Maybe he’ll have to start all over. Just another peek into the trials of your typical, stoical dung beetle.

Legion are those who heap scorn upon the Darrells of the dung beetle world. But pause and think about what life would be like without the determined Darrells… we’d be up to our ankles in excrement! We must express a little gratitude for these staunch recyclers. What a clean, beautiful world they bring us. No shit!

[Note: The story about Darrell, though a wee bit anthropomorphized,

is a true description of a dung beetle’s trials, as described by the venerable

J. Henri Fabre.]

Darrell the Stoical Dung Beetle--Part 1

While flying over the fields and meadows one morning, Darrell’s keen nose detected a gorgeous pile of cow poop. This was his lucky day! The poop was perfectly aged for balling—not too wet and mushy, nor too dry and crumbly. He flew down and dove in. He rolled himself a beautiful ball of poop and then commenced to trundle it home. He knew that he had a lengthy trip, with many obstacles to negotiate, before he could bury it and feast contentedly for the next several months, but he was up for the effort. His prize was worth the struggle.

Darrell industrially planted his two front legs on the ground, lowered his head, raised his back four legs against the turd ball, and began to push. Like many of his hard-working dung beetle cohorts, Darrell had the strength and determination to push a ball nearly three times his size and ten times his weight. Grunting, he got the ball rolling homeward. Darrell knew that many barriers might try to stymie him: tree roots, fallen branches, ruts, and clumps of weeds. Since he was pushing backwards, he was unable to see them coming, so it was a case of whether or not fortune continued to smile upon him. Would his luck hold out?           

A small dung beetle with a big ball of shit is at the mercy of unseen terrain. If he got stuck, Herculean effort may be required to keep going. Would he prevail? Would he be thwarted? He still remembered the time he tried to cross a fairway on the golf course and dropped his dung ball into a deep divot. He was almost home at the time, but had to give up and return to the poop pile and fashion a second dung ball, which he finally succeeded in rolling home. Like a kid trying to make an outsized snowman, Darrell forged bravely on.

Soon he bumped up against a small twig and his ball wouldn’t budge. Unable to see what the impediment was, Darrell dropped to the ground and circumnavigated his treasured globe. Spotting the twig wedged under the ball, he yanked it out, resumed his Atlas position at the front, and rolled on.

Some would regard Darrell as overly stupid, to take on such a task. If a bird or chipmunk spotted him, he’d probably get laughed at, tackling such an outlandish ambition—especially for such a disgusting object. But tenacious and resolute, Darrell knows that he can succeed. He’s done it before. He’s on a roll!

Unexpectedly, Doug the Dung Beetle suddenly flies down, lands next to Darrell and asks if he needs help. “Looks like you’ve got a mighty big ball there, brother. I could lend a foot.” Darrell is suspicious. He knows that Doug is a sneaky dude, and doesn’t trust him any farther than he could throw his turd ball. Trying to discourage the intruder, he says, “Thanks, but I’m doing OK. I’m sure I can manage.” He pushes on.

More on Darrell’s trials next time…

Doe with Suckling Fawn

I asked mom to turn sideways, so I could get a better photo, but she declined.

Fabre's Insects

Jean Henri Fabre was a French entomologist and author who graced our little planet with his copious observations of the insect world. He lived from 1823 to 1915. Charles Darwin paid tribute to Fabre, calling him an “inimitable observer.” And that’s exactly what Fabre was—an incomparable insect eyewitness, as well as a commentator; not an opinionated theorist and not an academic who sits in his book-lined office and claims esoteric postulates about the workings of the world.

Fabre spent many years on his hands and knees, his nose close to the ground, observing countless details of the lives of insects. He had an enormous respect for the “lowly” bugs: their sheer numbers, their intricate habits, and their crucial role in the ecological balance of life on Earth. While others pronounced their often conceited and off-base ideas about insects, Fabre meticulously and objectively watched. And he watched.

But he did more than just watch and become familiar with what the little critters were doing; he conducted experiments. Watching may tell us what is happening, but the clever experiments that Fabre conceived of revealed the meaning behind their actions. Otherwise, we too easily fall prey to our preconceived and anthropomorphic thoughts. As he wrote: without experimentation, we tend to observe an insect and draw conclusions, based not “upon the primary motives of its activities, but our own opinions, which always yield a reply in favor of our cherished notions.”

So he watched and he watched; he asked good questions, and he conducted experiments, a process “which alone is able to some extent to fathom the obscure problem of animal intelligence.” Intelligence? Yes… he saw that the simplest insects display an acumen that is to be admired. His sense of humility enabled him to pursue and perceive some amazing facts about the insect world. He was able to see beauty in what most people feel is repugnant. His essays on the dung beetle, for example, provide a prime example of his ability to perceive the fascination and value of this lowly bug.

An illustration of his humility is shown by a letter he wrote to a friend, in which he said, “Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be eroded from the world’s archives before we possess the last word that a gnat has to say to us.” I love that last phrase… the end of our knowledge will never come.

The dung beetle is a curious little critter—engaging in behavior that humans consider disgusting: finding piles of poop, carving out and forming a round ball that is some 10 times the weight of the beetle, and then patiently rolling the turd sphere to a safe location, where it can be buried, to serve as either a cache of food or as a brooding chamber for its offspring. The beetle requires no other repast or liquid other than his poop ball; it’s his complete and sole diet. What’s more, he prefers the dung of herbivores, so his taste cannot be considered to be non-discriminating. Carnivore poop is not nearly as delicious, apparently.

The dung beetle offers a valuable service to the environment, by removing a breeding ground for flies and other germ-spreading bugs. This helps improve the hygiene of a herd of cattle, as well as provides fertilizer for plants, after he entombs the cow dung, but doesn’t completely consume it.

The following biographical sketch of the travails of a dung beetle was inspired—maybe even incited—by Fabre’s detailed and fascinating descriptions of the habits of these little critters.

Next time: the adventures of Darrell the Dung Beetle

Close Calls

Listening to a bird’s call when he’s off at a distance in the woods can be quite a different experience than when he is close by. If the song propagates through the forest for some distance, the high-frequency content becomes absorbed by the leaves, leaving the lower frequencies to carry on alone. Some information is lost.

Every now and then, I will be treated by a bird singing out from a perch close to me and I can hear much more in his song. This is more likely to occur in the early morning or at dusk, when competing noise sources (wind, distant airplane, barking dogs, local vehicles) are absent. If I am also still (such as sitting pensively in my outdoor tub), I can hear subtleties in his call that I’d otherwise miss.

When the bird calls from back in the woods, what I tend to hear is a purer sound, more like a clean whistle… it’s a simple call. When he lands nearby and sings out, however, I am amazed at all the additional sounds and complexity I can pick up.

For instance, the distant call of the mourning dove is like a soft, low, pure whistle. It’s a clean, cooing sound. Last evening, however, a dove perched on a branch close by, as he called out. I could hear a breathiness to his call, that gets absorbed when he’s calling from back in the trees. This close-by dove sounded to me like he had a wheeze—as if his air passages were constricted, or he had a bit of a cold. And his melodic “coo” sounded more like a yodel, as if he had flipped into a falsetto voice—whereas it sounds more like a smooth, melodic slur when he’s deep in the woods.

When the bird is close, those softer, high-frequency sounds can be distinguished. A bird may quietly lisp, buzz, whisper, rattle, hiss, whir, and rasp, as part of its call. When he’s close by, all these gentle, high-frequency sounds can be heard. They make his call far more interesting and informative.

When we humans talk (or sing) to each other, most of the information that we hear is contained in the high-frequency subtleties. Consonants create clicking, popping, hissing, and buzzing sounds that convey most of the message. Our throat cavities, lips, tongue, and nasal passages create many inflections that add a wide range of sounds. A bird has none of these sound shapers—his complexity comes from incredibly intricate muscle twitches of his bronchial and syrinx regions, deep in his throat. It’s a simpler sound, but still can be loaded with information.

Birds do manage to accomplish a lot of communication with each other—despite the lack of mouth parts to modulate their song. I’m wondering if all the additional sounds I hear when a bird calls from close by are what they use to relay all that information to each other. What difference might he be signaling if that familiar song of his is preceded by a sift gurgle or rattle, or if he tacks on a bit of a whir or buzz at the end, or even if he has a bit of a cold? I’m sure they are telling each other things that I’m usually missing.

White Spotted Sawyer

A damaging wood borer.

You Are Not You--Part 2

All this anti-bacterial frenzy ignores the truth that our bodies cannot live without our friends the bacteria. In just the last few decades has science begun to realize the beneficial role of many types of internal bacteria. We’d best learn to call a truce in our bacterial wars, or we’re gonna crash and become part of our own “collateral damage.”

But breeding new species of super bugs is not the only unfortunate fallout of our war on bacteria. Some recent research seems to be pointing the way toward the increasing incidence of autoimmune diseases and other chronic modern ailments. It’s still a mystery exactly why such diseases as Crohn’s disease, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and others are escalating, but our blundering is probably involved. We are altering our environment and upsetting biological balances that were built over eons. It’s becoming clear that antibiotics are a significant cause of autoimmune disorders. How?

The driving force behind our immune system is not a self-contained mechanism run by us, but is created primarily by beneficial bacteria. Ever since we became a separate species (about 200,000 years ago), our immune system has been able to tread a delicate balance between being too lax (thus failing to detect and battle foreign pathogens) and too aggressive (and attacking our own cells). Beneficial bacteria have trained our immune system to achieve that crucial balance. It’s not our own DNA that does the job, but bacterial (non-human) DNA. But now we’re upsetting that balance. We’ve saturated our bodies with antibiotics to the point that our immune system is confused and sometimes attacks our own cells.

Another way we mess up our immune system is by not exposing babies to dirt. We’ve become so obsessed with protecting our newborns from nasty bugs that we raise them in as sterile an environment as we can. Meeting a paucity of microorganisms, their immune systems never get a chance to become robust and balanced. This is a particular problem today, as more women are receiving cesarean sections to deliver their babies. The womb is an incredible bug-shielding organ. As an embryo develops from two cells to a trillion, it can safely do so in the womb’s sterile environment—without being turned into some kind of monster by mom’s invading bugs. But to survive in this dirty world, a newborn must very quickly develop its immune system. That process begins as it descends the bacterial-laden birth canal, and continues, as the baby sucks bacterial-laden mother’s milk and inhales Uncle Charlie’s bacterial-laden breath.

But a baby born by C-section immediately pops from a sterile womb into a germ infested world, with no preparation in the birth canal. We aggravate the situation by spraying disinfectant on everything that baby touches. Result: an out-of-balance immune system that goes haywire and either allows otherwise harmless bacteria to beat it down or goes into overdrive and attacks itself.

So the next time your doctor starts to write you out a prescription for a course of antibiotics for some non-lethal infection, you might think about declining. The next time you talk with an expectant mother, you might caution her about the sterile danger of a C-section and encourage her to breastfeed. If neither of these opportunities arises, express a little gratitude for all the friendly foreign critters who make their abode inside you. Your life literally depends on them!

[Note: Some of the information that stimulated this posting is found in the

June 2012 issue of Scientific American.]