On clear nights with no moon, dung beetles have been shown to navigate by the Milky Way, using the light it sketches to help them roll balls of dung they've worked so hard to sculpt— in a straight line, away from the dung heap and potential rivals. For mating and reproducing, a well-packed offering can weigh 250 times a beetle's body weight. A dung ball is perfectly round, the size of a chocolate truffle. A female dung beetle lays her eggs in it, then tends the grubs that emerge. This industry helps aerate the soil, break down nutrients, disperse seeds, thereby repurposing fields of excrement that might otherwise carpet this earth end to end. Considering the material they work with, dung beetles are a tough act to follow— their efficiency almost elegant, their collaboration a given. Trucks pick up our garbage once a week. Now and then, the contents spill into the street. But we don't quite know what to do with the neighbor who so rudely dumps bags filled with broken eggshells, chicken bones, fruit peel, and sink detritus onto our front yard, just because in the dark, we mistook her bin for ours.
Lovely beetles . . .