In the face of global warming, some dung beetles may already have a survival strategy.
As temperatures rise, temperate rainbow scarabs bury their dung deeper, keeping developing young inside dung cool enough to survive, ecologist Kimberly Sheldon reported January 6 at a meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Portland, Ore. Preliminary field experiments show that their tropical cousins lack this behavioral flexibility and thus may be more vulnerable to climate change.
Rainbow scarabs (Phanaeus vindex) are a type of tunneling dung beetle. Rather than roll gigantic dung balls along the ground as incubators for their young, these grape-sized beetles dig tunnels and carry dung below