Various field specimens of Scarabaeidae from unknown locations, collected in the early 1900's.

I recently visited the curator’s office at the nearby Museum of Natural History and had an up close visit with several long deceased dung beetles. Dung Beetles are members of the Scarabaeoidea family. They are found throughout the world and were especially noted by the Egyptians who compared the habits of the dung beetle (rolling a ball of scat and soil particles in to their burrow to nuture a mass of developing larvae) to the sun god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky. Here in Iowa there have been many species identified mostly in sandy loess prairie habitats.

In Wisconsin there are  recorded around 178 species of Scarabaeoidea, which includes approx. 132 species of what we usually call dung beetles. Wisconsin has several of the dung beetles that are “rollers”, including Canthon (3 in WI), Melanocanthon (1 in WI).  All of these species like to have sandy soils, and they are most common in our sandy central counties, or along the WI river where we get sandy soils.

Kerry Katovich at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater says, “They can be very common at some sites, and I have seen on a nice sunny day 30-50 rolling dung balls across sandy roads.  I do not think they would be uncommon in Iowa, but I think you need to go to the right location, sandy, also it should be open, and sunny for them to be active.”

These composters are essential  to the development of soil and the health of the land. Could the fact that much of our industrial farmed topsoil, stripped of the entire humus rich A horizon, have anything to do the loss of this important soil builder? As we pump  liquid Nitrogen, fertilizers and herbicides in to the less fertile B and C horizons could we maybe, just maybe take a few years to put our shoulder to earth rebuild topsoil. Can we sacrifice a few million acres from the corporate farming industry to plant prairie?