Dung Beetles

BARRETT ANTHONY KLEIN: Behold Scarabaeus sacer, the sacred scarab beetle—most famous of the dung ball rollers.

PETER KUPER: That’s Dr. Barrett Anthony Klein, Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. He studies cultural entomology and animal behavior. 

KLEIN: These are dung beetles, of which there are thousands of species—found on every continent but Antarctica—that form balls of dung and roll them away to avoid the fierce competition that invariably ensues on the ephemeral valuable resource that is a dung pile.

KUPER: The dirty work of the dung beetle provides invaluable agricultural and ecological benefits to humans today. 

KLEIN: We would be knee deep in dung if it weren’t for these dung ball rollers removing the wastes—largely of our livestock, but of other animals as well. Not only do dung beetles remove these wastes, but they also aerate the soil, and they fertilize, by burying the dung.

KUPER: In Ancient Egypt, the relationship between dung beetles and humans extended into the afterlife.

KLEIN: Dung beetles can roll away hundreds of times their own weight, and curiously, they do so in straight lines. Ancient Egyptians recognized this peculiarity and made Khepri, a scarab god, the morning manifestation of Ra, the sun god. Because the dung ball rolled across the savanna by a dung beetle looks strangely like the sun passing across the sky. 

Millions of these scarabs appear in Egyptian artifacts. These were used as amulets. And some of these amulets were placed on the hearts of the dead.

Passage to the afterlife required weighing that heart against the Feather of Truth.