If you're forced to empty your bowels somewhere in the African grasslands, you don't have to worry about befouling the landscape. As a press release explains, dung beetles would make quick work of your deposit, with the waste gone in as little as 30 minutes. Elephants leave a much larger heap. That raised some questions for Frank Krell, curator of entomology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and his wife, ecologist Sylvia Krell-Westerwalbesloh—chief among them, how many beetles does elephant dung attract?
In a study published in the Science of Nature, the co-authors explain they took a ball, or bolus, of elephant dung from a heap in the Laikipia region in central Kenya and exposed it on bare soil overnight for 12 hours. When time was up, they collected what remained of the dung, the soil under it, and the dung beetles within, and separated the beetles by putting the dung in water, where it sank as the beetles floated. Then came the counting effort: Krell-Westerwalbesloh established the decimated bolus held 13,699.
That made for some easy math: that bolus weighed one kilogram, and a single elephant typically releases 160 kilograms of dung a day, meaning one elephant could sustain 2.12 million dung beetles on any given day. The Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem Krell and Krell-Westerwalbesloh were working in is home to between 5,000 and 7,500 elephants, which could sustain about 14 billion dung beetles. As the study notes, "The decline or extinction of elephants, at least in East African grasslands, may have a massive cascade effect on the populations of coprophagous beetles and the biota dependent on or gaining an advantage from them." (More discoveries stories.)
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