How to Use dung beetle in a Sentence
dung beetle
noun-
The dung beetle has been deemed the strongest insect on Earth.
—Manasee Wagh, Popular Mechanics, 19 Jan. 2023
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Through a dung beetle’s compound eyes, stars appear as blobs, not as points of light.
—New York Times, 29 July 2021
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My papa’s house furled and unfurled, high as a church steeple in some parts, and low as a dung beetle in others.
—Okwiri Oduor, Harper’s Magazine , 22 June 2022
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But by the 1960s, native Australian dung beetles were struggling in the mire of sticky, non-native cow pats.
—Richard Jones, Smithsonian, 10 Jan. 2018
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To escape competition at the dung pile, a ball-rolling dung beetle forms a piece of dung into a ball and rolls it away.
—Seriously Science, Discover Magazine, 8 Dec. 2014
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The dung beetle, Scarabaeus nigroaeneus, as its name suggests, eats the faeces of large grazing mammals.
—Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 22 Oct. 2012
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When there are lots of species of dung beetles around, and faeces vanish quickly, an ecosystem is assumed to be in good shape.
—The Economist, 11 Jan. 2020
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To find out whether these same genes guide horn growth, Hu and his team genetically tinkered with dung beetles.
—Erica Tennenhouse, Science | AAAS, 21 Nov. 2019
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Among the insects dying: the useful dung beetle, which eats pests and redistributes nutrients in the soil of cow pastures.
—National Geographic, 12 Dec. 2019
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The various species of dung beetle that live together in the Great Plains region have evolved to consume, and share peacefully, its turd piles.
—Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 17 Apr. 2012
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Previously, a dung beetle and some hare remains had been the only signs of animal life at the site, Willerslev said.
—Maddie Burakoff, Anchorage Daily News, 8 Dec. 2022
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In one entry, a dung beetle climbs out of a dead man’s mouth; a jellyfish floats between buildings in another.
—Tim Diovanni, Dallas News, 23 July 2020
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Using scent detectors on their antennae, dung beetles home in on a pile of feces and descend en masse.
—Jason Bittel, National Geographic, 24 June 2019
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But Australian dung beetles were used to recycling marsupial dung and could not tackle the cow chips.
—Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, WSJ, 20 June 2019
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For the nocturnal African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus, this becomes a useful reference point.
—Fiona McMillan, National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2019
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Certain dung beetle females have even evolved horns that may be used for battling with other females in contests over access to males.
—Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 2 Aug. 2021
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And a scarab ring (which held amuletic powers in ancient Egypt) features iridescent wings crafted from, what else, but the actual wings of a dung beetle.
—Lilah Ramzi, Vogue, 21 Aug. 2018
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And now Dacke has discovered yet another tool in the same dung beetle’s sensory array.
—Jason Bittel, National Geographic, 24 June 2019
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In the right light and aspect, dung beetles are strikingly colorful and, yes, beautiful creatures.
—Shannon Tompkins, Houston Chronicle, 3 May 2018
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In ancient Egypt, the most important amulet was the scarab, usually modeled after the common Egyptian dung beetle, Scarabaeus sacer.
—National Geographic, 13 Mar. 2019
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In the new movie, the tuft has an even wilder journey, nabbing multiple minutes of screen time as it gets consumed by a giraffe, becomes part of a dung beetle’s haul and is carried by ants before Rafiki finds it.
—Raisa Bruner, Time, 17 July 2019
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For the dung beetle Onthophagus taurus, one of those is a type of nematode worm that helps cultivate the right mix of bacteria and fungi to ensure the beetle larvae stay fed and healthy.
—Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 3 Oct. 2018
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But who would’ve thought the humble dung beetle had celestial navigation figured out?
—Meredith Carpenter, Discover Magazine, 31 Jan. 2014
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Graney's version of her appears first as a precocious 11-year-old, redistributing treasury money from the military to the poor and ending a plague of flies with the help of her mother's pet jumbo dung beetle.
—Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 18 Apr. 2018
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Though dung beetles of the world have many different behaviors, their most famous maneuver involves rolling fresh excrement into a ball.
—Liz Langley, National Geographic, 4 Feb. 2017
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In the end, the humble dung beetle’s horns can give us a peek into the mechanisms underlying the vast complexity of animal forms, humans included.
—Smithsonian, 22 Mar. 2017
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Other studies have used bugs like mosquitoes and dung beetles, Gillett’s insect of choice, and could be added to rainforest surveys to increase the diversity mammals detected.
—Kyle Frischkorn, Smithsonian, 7 Aug. 2017
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Some antiparasite treatments in cattle can harm dung beetles, for example.
—Gretchen Vogel, Science | AAAS, 6 Sep. 2019
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The four zones are: Desert: Just beyond the entrance will be a dung beetle globe fountain, rope climb and an animal care facility adjacent to an exhibit featuring prairie dogs, burrowing owls and fennec foxes.
—Roger Showley, sandiegouniontribune.com, 12 Jan. 2018
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Participants included experts on, among many other groups, bees, dragonflies, katydids, and dung beetles.
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 13 Mar. 2023
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dung beetle.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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