Field notes on the Flightless Dung Beetle ... ' Miskruier' ' Inkuba- bulongo'
Easy to spot
You will see these large black beetles on the road as you drive through the park. They are especially easy to see after rain.
What are they doing?
The flightless dung beetles eat both elephant and buffalo dung. They are very quick to find fresh dung and either eat it at the spot where it dropped or roll it into a ball and bury it to eat later.
Dung beetles are very important
* They help recycle vegetation by redistributing it and speeding up the decomposition of dung, returning valuable nutrients to the soil.
* The adults, larvae and pupae provide food for small carnivores like the mongooses, meerkat and bat - eared fox.
Culture
We humans could learn a thing or two from the dung beetles. Living in a throw - away culture, we are destroying habits by taking natural resources, then dumping what we made on rubbish tips, taking more natural resources and so on. We should not be too quick to throw things away, but reuse or recycle, like the dung beetle.
Family life
The female usually chooses the softer buffalo dung for a brood ball and rolls it to the size of a golf ball. She moves it away using her powerful hind legs, while the male follows along behind.
Sometimes, other dung beetles will try to steal a food or brood ball. When she has found a suitable spot, she buries the ball, with the male on top. They mate under the ground and a single egg is laid within the ball.
The female stays with the ball until the juvenile stage of her young is complete. The larva feeds on the dung ball from the inside and spends 3-4 months as a pupa before it emerges as an immature adult.
Save the dung beetles!
It is not an easy life, being a flightless dung beetle. There may be plenty of dung around, but there are also plenty of cars. Elephants tend to walk along the roads and so dung beetles have to risk life and limb to get their dung. You can help by avoiding driving over dung piles as well as the beetles themselves.
Did you know...?
There are over 1800 species of dung beetle.
The mission of the Addo Elephant National Park is to conserve the faunal and floral assemblages and ecological processes that characterise the unique Eastern Cape region, and to actively present this for the appreciation by visitors.
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link below for larger mage
http://www.sanparks.org/parks/addo/images/maps/addomap2.jpg to see map of Addo Elephant National Park
