We raced our beetles.

Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles.

So obviously beetles can see polarized light.

These goliath beetles are wired in their wings.

We don't know yet what dung beetles use.

Red beetles, the bark of the bongbong tree.

Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles.

So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.

And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here.

Think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils,

Okay, so what we've got so far is, what are beetles doing?

Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom.

And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort.

If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground.

There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums.

There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us.

And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles.

When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles.

Now wouldn't you know it, there's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature.

Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles.

The dung beetles ate the camel dung, the flies died through lack of food, and trachoma dropped.

The important thing here is that this is not a one way trip, as in most dung beetles.

There are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings.

This is part of 1 4 million acres of spruce trees in alaska that have been killed by bark beetles.

It mentioned leopards and ring tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera, which turn out to be beetles.

And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung feeders.

Those pine beetles used to be killed by the cold winters, but there are fewer days of frost, and so the pine trees are being devastated.

He's born in Cameroon, which is smack in the middle of my tropics map, and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles.

So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems.

So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior.

Now I clicked on this on purpose, but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake, it does remind me, for the band, see The Beatles, for the car see Volkswagon Beetle, but I am here for beetle beetles.

So this dung pat was actually well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well adapted to rolling balls of dung.

But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see.