“Pound for pound the strongest animal alive — and it navigates by the Milky Way.”

The dung beetle has built an entire dignified life around other animals' waste, and honestly, it's crushing it. It sculpts fresh dung into a neat ball, often many times its own weight, then rolls it home in a determined straight line to eat or to raise its young inside. That straight line is the marvel: to avoid rivals who would happily steal the ball, the beetle bolts in the most direct route possible, and it stays on course by reading the sky — including, astonishingly, the dim band of the Milky Way, making it the only animal known to navigate by the galaxy itself. It is also, proportionally, the strongest creature on Earth, capable of pulling over a thousand times its body weight, the equivalent of a person towing several loaded buses. A devoted parent and a tireless recycler, the dung beetle quietly keeps the planet's pastures clean, one heroic ball of poop at a time.

Scientific name

Scarabaeinae

Size

Thumbnail-sized (most under 3 cm).

Habitat

Grasslands, forests, and deserts on every continent but Antarctica.

Diet

Dung — rolled, buried, and eaten with relish.

Conservation

LC · Least Concern

Picnic threat level

Picnic threat: none to you. A real threat to anything you'd rather not discuss.

Axel Strauß, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Learn more →