Dor Beetle

• It can break off and carry a piece of dung weighing up to 200 times its own weight.
• It has been calculated that in a year a population can bury as much as a tonne of dung, aerating and fertilising the soil while also cleaning the pasture.
• The division of labour is the reverse of that in most beetles: here it is the male that makes and buries the ball, and the female only lays.
• It does not roll balls: it digs. It sinks a deep vertical shaft directly beneath the dung pat and takes the dung down to the bottom, where the female lays her eggs. This is the strategy of the so-called tunnelling dung beetles, as opposed to rollers such as the sacred scarab.
• That labour buries large quantities of dung and is an ecosystem service of the first order: it aerates the soil, works in nutrients and reduces flies and livestock parasites.
• The pair cooperate: usually the male digs and the female provisions.
• It almost always carries mites clinging to its body, which travel with it from dung pat to dung pat.
• Its populations have fallen with the use of antiparasitic drugs of the avermectin family in livestock, which are excreted still active in the dung and kill the larvae of the beetles that process it.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Grassland, dehesa woodland pasture and rural areas with livestock. It digs tunnels up to some 60 cm deep beneath cowpats

Litter / clutch size

The male forms, transports and buries the dung ball, and the female then lays her eggs beside it so that it feeds the larvae

Sources consulted: Universidad de Málaga (UMA Divulga); La Guía de Biología; Asturnatura; Fauna Europaea

Best time: Spring and autumn evenings and nights, when it leaves its tunnels in search of dung