THE GYPTIANS WORSHIPED THE DUNG BEETLE. We ignore him. To the people of the Nile, this beetle, which eats dung, was the scarab, revered not only for its iridescent skeleton and its elegant form, but for the habit we find most disgusting. It buries shit and thus becomes the mother of fertility.
There are more than 120 species of dung beetle. Each one not only eats dung, it collects dung, leaps on dung, and rolls dung into balls so big and smooth-sided that the uninitiated have mistaken them for cannonballs. It then pushes the dung into a private burrow, proof against the flies that otherwise swarm it. In each ball, large or small, the female beetle lays one egg, which she tends carefully, scraping off noxious growths, until her baby is born from the dung’s heart.
Most coleopterans, as scientists call beetles, don’t give a hoot about their young, and most do more harm than good in the soil. In fact, beetles have a kind of doubly bad reputation among gardeners, because both the larval and adult forms are voracious feeders, often on growing plants of the sort that humans favor. In fact, the larva of a beetle may have a siphon jaw particularly adapted to sucking the vital juice from the roots of a plant, while the adult may evolve a smacking set of mandibles, perfectly formed to devour the same plant’s leaves.
The Japanese beetle, that fingernail-sized behemoth whose teeming numbers in the summer attack almost every plant, but especially roses and grape vines, is a case in point. Though it resembles the scarab with its iridescent shell, the Japanese beetle is otherwise a perfect beast. The larvae, nasty little C-shaped white grubs, eat the roots of lawns. The adults multiply at an exponential rate and can skeletonize an unprotected rose garden in an afternoon.
But the Egyptians did not worship the scarab simply because it was more polite than most beetles. They did not worship it because it was cleanly, removing a pile of ox feces in less than an hour. They revered it because it brought the dead to life. It rose out of the shit and took flight on iridescent wings.
The grub of the dung beetle grows and metamorphoses into a young beetle, entirely inside the laboriously prepared ball. Like an egg, to all appearances it is a dead mass. Worse still, however polished it may appear, it is clearly matter that has come out the wrong end of a cow, elephant, monkey, or virtually any other mammal. What the Egyptians noted, however, was that a dung beetle went down into the ground with its ball of shit, and some months later, a new young beetle would appear.
This is why it was the custom to cut out the heart of a dead pharoah and replace the organ with a scarab of lapis lazuli. The scarab was a symbol of eternal life.
Perhaps a more appropriate symbol of renewal has never been found. The scarab renews not only its own young, but also the soil. When you realize that in Africa the record number of scarabs on a single elephant turd is something on the order of sixteen thousand (I want to know who counted them, and how), you get a picture of how many burrows there are and how much dung is incorporated into the soil each year.
The superiority of buried dung to manure on the surface is well known. If the feces are left on the surface, much of the nitrogen contained in them will volatilize and be lost in the air within a few days; if they are buried, less is lost and more is fixed in the soil. Just as important, the buried feces will tend to make more stable humus, improving the soil’s moisture-holding capabilities and aeration, and making it a more propitious environment for roots.
As a result, the grasses on which the herbivores feed grow up thicker and faster. The herbivores are healthy and well fed. They defecate copiously. A cow is liable to leave fifteen patties per day; a single elephant turd weighs four pounds. The beetle is the linchpin of this cycle of renewal, which keeps a whole landscape healthy.
The Egyptians admired the facts of the case. We might add that the beetles are uncommonly clever and industrious. When you depend on another’s leavings for your meals, you had better stick close to your resource. In areas where large herbivores are common, that does not take much doing, but individual species of dung beetle have found very acrobatic means of keeping themselves abreast of the object of their desire.
In Panama, the scarabs fly up into the treetops every morning where the howler monkeys live. When the mammals let fly, the bugs latch on, falling to the forest floor, where they take their meal, bury it, and return to the treetops for more. Others cling to the hinder parts of their lumbering providers, leaping onto the meal as it drops.
This entrepreneurial spirit pays off because it gives them a jump on the competition. Wherever there is a shortage of dung beetles, there is an excess of flies, since flies are the other sort of insect that by preference lays its eggs in dung. The competition is fierce, and not to the beetles’ advantage, because they are slower-moving and subject to being gobbled by birds, monkeys, and the other predators who gather to feast on fresh bug. The quicker a dung beetle gets its find underground, the safer it will be.
We live in an era of delicate sensibilities, and one wonders if the Gilded Age ladies who sported Louis Comfort Tiffany’s scarab neck-laces—a few made with real dried scarabs—would have done so had they known of the beetle’s lifestyle. True, scarabs are somewhat less unpalatable than their near relatives, the burying beetles, who do with dead mice and other small animals just what the scarab does with dung.
Perhaps the burying beetle, not the scarab, is the symbol for our own time. The connection between death and life was a matter of daily knowledge to the Egyptians, but in the “civilized” countries we have pretty well succeeded in exiling the sight of death to the hinterlands of consciousness.
The burying beetle brings it back.