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

A camel dung dealer.

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

They remove dung, they pollinate our crops.

All right, so he sells camel dung.

We don't know yet what dung beetles use.

Fly 4 makes more sense, four dung flies.

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.

Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground.

They are grown completely in a ball of dung.

This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing.

And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets.

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.

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.

So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball.

My dung is burned as fuel. My milk is used for cheese.

And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung.

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

Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood.

At first, she also called him to her with words which she presumably thought were friendly, like Come here for a bit, old dung beetle! or Hey, look at the old dung beetle!

So the truth is, if you look at the temperature over here, dung is cool.

On the outward path, he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung.

So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel.

Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting.

Man. That dung fly, Hong Jang Mi, is getting in the way. I absolutely hate her!

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

This is India and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India. It's cow dung.

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

So the birds that eat insects and seeds, they're accumulating phosphates and the excess comes out in their dung.

It's in slow motion. but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it.

And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball.

And we did side by side tests, and here you can see the charcoal briquettes and here the cow dung.

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

Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls.

So you have less waste, and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung.

There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest.

So what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system, and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball.

And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires, and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel.

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.

There is also a lesson for you in cattle. From the contents of their bellies, from between the dung and blood, We give you pure milk to drink, pleasant for those who drink it.

So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not, we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence, we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor, dozing cow.

This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

And verily there is for you in the cattle a lesson We give you to drink of that which is in their bellies, from betwixt the dung and the blood milk Pure and pleasant to swallow for the drinkers.

And he doesn't like this first position, but he comes up with a second position, and about 50 minutes later, that nest is finished, and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets.