Dung beetle

The bugs? Mosquito?

Yeah, a dung beetle.

They c- they flying for the lights.

I just wanna sit out back and smoke

A dung beetle? [dramatic music]

To honor our country on its 250th birthday, this can of Copenhagen goes out to those defending the free American soil that our tobacco has taken root in for over two centuries and counting.

Here's to the calloused hands of freedom.

We'll have more a little later.

First though, the farm vet with a passion for nature and dung beetles in particular.

After years of working in the industry, Claire Whittle says she realised that the worming products she was prescribing for sheep and cows were damaging the wildlife she cared about.

She's now taken on a hill farm near Wrexham and is building up a herd of beef cattle.

They want a fight.

They know how valuable that poo is and they want to be in there because they want to eat something in there.

And then you've got your dung beetles and they're just going from bar to bar, getting drunk on liquid dung.

And that's exactly what they're doing.

man.

The Barracuda in DKC3, and DKL3, the Battery in Banjo-Tooie, and the Dung Beetle in Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Right, right, yeah.

Which, my headcanon, by the way, is that the Battery is named after the Barracuda, and the Dung Beetle is named after the Battery.

because the battery has the power of a barracuda and the dung beetle eats shit and it just keeps going and going and going like a battery yeah that that was my rationale for all of that you're welcome everybody all right Speaking of names that have been reused, or at least have been reused by fans, this one is kind of a mind-blowing one.

Because in the West, outside of Japan, before the internet really opened up our ability for... cross-language communication between the different sections of the fandom, it was kind of hard to come about some of these materials that were Japan-only.

So the Super Donkey Kong GB guide was kind of this unknown treasure trove of just unseen renders and Donkey Kong Land knowledge.

I promise you, I cannot hear it.

Sounds like a tunneling dung beetle.

So...

What would make you go to Dung Beetle, honestly?

Oh, do you

know where his mind

So what would it mean to be a dung beetle in Denver? Or, God, worse, a Vegas dung beetle? Which, that's my band name now.

We're playing The Sphere soon.

Yeah, Ryan and the Vegas dung beetles.

But honestly...

The way that we are disrupting not only our own animal lives, but other animals' lives is profound.

Yeah, well, watch us walk around Vegas.

We are dung beetles without a Milky Way.

We are walking in circles.

[instrumental music]

Did you know the horned dung beetle is one of the strongest animals ever measured for its size?

What?

In one experiment, a male pulled more than 1,100 times its own body weight.

[instrumental music] Hello, friends, and welcome back to Sleep Tight Science, a bedtime podcast that answers your questions about science.

A little while ago in our episode about houses made from poop, we mentioned the dung beetle, just briefly, and a large number of you sent us email wanting to know more.

So in this episode, we thought we might focus on the world's strongest poop enthusiast.

The dung beetle does a job nobody else wants.

Go ahead, doctor.

Well, I was gonna say that in both cases, those animals navigate, and dung beetles navigate using stars.

And we know this because people have actually studied dung beetles using stars as directional compasses.

So they align their direction of movement to particular configurations of stars, which are light sources, so they're using the light.

Ants can also rely on light, light and position of the sun, but they also use other cues.

And scientists know that because they actually reduced the length of an ant's legs and also did experiments to put ants on stilts to increase the length of ants' nest-- legs, and the ants either undershot or overshot the journey back to their nests when they were removed from having access to those other guidance cues.

So all these insects are actually integrating a whole host of different information to find their way around.

And in the case of dung beetles, it's stars.