EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IS MOST commonly described in the catchphrase ‘the survival of the fittest’, which implies a degree of competition and lack of co-operation. The curious thing about dung beetles is how, in their evolutionary niches, they have both a combative and a co-operative existence. On any pile of fresh rhino dung, the array of dung beetles is mind-boggling, from the tiniest ones barely visible to the naked eye, to the large ball rollers. It is the collective activity of the different beetles, all working in their specific niches, which ensures that the large pile of dung is rapidly processed.

Ulisse Aldrovandi thought that insects could be described as atoms, because they were so tiny. Five hundred years later this analogy is most appropriate, as we know from the splitting of the atom quite how powerful very small entities can be. Insects are no different: a plague of locusts can destroy fields of food crops; a colony of termites can consume an entire tree and transform dry earth; a hive of bees can make the difference between a productive and a virtually dead orchard. We also know from the previous chapters what happens when a little settler arrives on a foreign shore and transforms life in the way that the dung beetles did in Australia. As we have previously stated, if there were no dung beetles then there might have been no human race, because the levels of disease and faeces on the planet might have led to our demise before we really got going as a new species.

Together with earthworms and ants, dung beetles represent a trinity of earth transformers. They literally change the earth beneath us, and they do so at absolutely no cost to us. We have only begun to start understanding them, and although less curious minds might think that everything that needs to be said about them has already been covered, there is still so much we do not know. We do not know, for example, if all the species have been accounted for; we do not really know how they came to arrive in places like Madagascar, or indeed in many other countries. We do not know why some species are such generalists while others have very narrow geographic ranges and food choices.