Rhino or Dung Beetle
Across the Serengeti travels a curious animal. Standing on its head and rolling a ball behind it, the dung beetle is working hard for its children and the ecology of Serengeti.
Beetles are the most diverse and successful group of animals on the planet, with over 400,000 known species. They occupy a myriad of niches, including herbivores, carnivores, parasites, and detritivores like dung beetles.
Dung beetles are one of the most important animals in the Serengeti, because of their particular love of dung. There are millions of animals in the Serengeti, each one eating, each one running about and all of them producing dung. Without dung beetles, the Serengeti would quickly become unlivable.
Adult dung beetles spend their days buzzing about in the Serengeti following grazing animals and looking for nice fresh dung. When they see some, they land and burrow into it, building a ball of dung and soil. The beetle then turns, stands on its head, and rolls the ball away using its back legs. After traveling a distance from a meter to a hundred meters, the beetle finds a suitable patch of soil, digs a tunnel, rolls the dung ball down and lays an egg on the dung. Then the adult emerges, fills in the hole and flies away to repeat the cycle.
These amazing creatures roll away up to 75 percent of the dung dropped in Serengeti. When soil researchers dug pits on the Serengeti plains, they found 15-20% of the soil was made up of buried dung balls. The huge amounts of dung and soil moved by these creatures serves to fertilize the soil, loosen the soil, and open up areas on the surface for grass to grow.
Some dung beetles are generalists, while some others are specialists on different types of dung. Thus, there are wildebeest dung beetles, elephant dung beetles, and some that will use any type of dung. Not much is known about the dung beetles in Serengeti other than measurements of their dung-removal. One person who did research on them found over a hundred species in a single morning of collecting.
You can tell a beetle from other insects because of its "Elytra", which are a specialized front pair of wings. These wings are hard and are folded back over the body as protection for the body and the flying wings underneath.
