I was out geocaching the other afternoon and one of the caches I
was after was just off a main road between Niceville and Mossy Head.
I pulled off the highway onto a gravel road leading into the woods
and stopped the truck.
The GPS said the cache was close so I turned the truck off was
getting my pen when I looked out the window and saw a ball of
something rolling across the gravel.
It was a little smaller than a golf ball and black and it would
roll this way for a minute and then back the other way and then off
in another direction. Never really getting anywhere but definitely
moving around.
What is that? There was no wind blowing anything around so I got
out to see what was happening.
I walked past a pile of bear poop and over to the rolling ball
only to discover beetles rolling a ball of bear poop all around the
gravel road.
I've never seen beetles moving a ball of poop around and the first
thing that came to mind was Dung Beetles.
Do we have dung beetles in Florida? I'm seriously uneducated when
it comes to bugs but dung beetles sound like something that would
live in an Indiana Jones type place.
There were 4 beetles pushing the poop ball around but they didn't
seem to be going anywhere in particular – just sort of here and
there.
A 5th beetle was all by himself in the middle of the
bear poop, busy doing something with those creepy little pincers of
his.
When I got home I learned that these are probably Green June
Beetles and even though they aren't called dung beetles they eat
dung.
I also found out that the reason the poop ball was moving back and
forth was that the beetles were actually fighting over it and each
was trying to push it in the direction they wanted to go.
I did notice in the video I took that when just one had control
the ball moved in a straight line.
And the lone beetle in the pile of poop? I really wish I'd have
paid more attention to him because apparently he was making his own
poop ball.
As I was reading about beetles I learned that there are some who
navigate by climbing on top of their poop ball and use the Milky Way
to guide them.