All My Friends and Relatives Eat Shit

“Hi there. My name is Ralph and I’m a Dung Beetle. I live on the western edge of the tropical Amazon rainforest in a country called Ecuador. I very seldom see the sun because of the massive overhead canopy formed by the large tropical trees in our neighborhood. We do have a daytime and a night time though. The night time is very dark and I can often see the stars through the openings in the trees. But in the daytime, it is very difficult to see the sky. Because of the light coming through the leaves above me, everything appears to have a green tinge to it. I’ve heard that in most places in the world, daylight is white. In my forest, however, the daylight is green light.

I have about 80 brothers and sisters who were all born at about the same time as me. We all started out as juicy little maggots which hatched from eggs that were located in the middle of a ball of shit. That’s right, I was born in the middle of a ball of shit. My parents were out walking around one day in the green sunlight of our forest when they suddenly picked up the smell of some fresh monkey poop which had been excreted by a Howler and then had fallen from high up in a tree. Perhaps it fell from heaven. We’ll never know for sure. Anyway, my mom and dad scurried quickly in the direction of the pile of poop. Other dung beetles were there as well. My parents knew a few of them from seeing them at Beetles' Concerts and card nights, but most of them were strangers. Word (smell) spreads fast when there is poop to be divided up. My parents worked quickly and started to cut off bits of shit from the big pile. Then they shaped the pieces into balls and rolled them to our home tunnel and buried them. Before they secured them in the tunnel, my mom and dad had sex and then mom laid some fertilized eggs into the shit balls. Mom and Dad must have really had a wild time that night because they had enough fertilized eggs to fill up 80 balls of poop. They had to work quickly before other dung beetles finished off all the poop. My father is middle aged (about a year and a half old), and very strong. He can actually roll a fresh ball of shit that is more than 50 times his body weight and at the same time, fight off some of the other fathers who wanted to get their hind legs on his balls. The individual strength record goes to a male Onthphagus taurus dung beetle, which pulled a load equivalent to 1,141 times its own body weight. That would be like a 150-pound person pulling 80 tons.

Anyway, they worked long into the night, rolling balls and having sex. When it got dark, they had to look up to the stars and find the Milky Way, which helped to guide them to our home tunnel. So all my brothers and sisters started out as eggs in the middle of these shit balls. A few weeks later when we hatched as worms, we were surrounded by the most wonderful buffet of monkey shit anyone could ever imagine or wish for. I often wondered how Mom and Dad were able to resist the temptation of devouring all that tasty Monkey Poop before they rolled it into our egg balls, but I found out later that as they became older they steered away from solid food and relied only on squeezing the shit to drink the juices within. As I get older myself, the yummier that sounds.

My siblings and I managed to eat each of our own entire shit ball. This was quite a chore so we had a nap after we were done. While I was sleeping, a cocoon formed around my soft little body. When I woke up, I was trapped and I had to wiggle and squirm and roll and push in order to break free. When I did, I looked around at the rest of the kids and lo and behold, we all looked just like Mom and Dad. No sooner had we become adults than what should I smell, but the fresh scent of some great Panther feces. Unfortunately, I was new to the game and I didn’t realize that the Poop de Panther was not a quality meal. It was more like junk food, you know, just a lot of empty calories. I tried some and it was sort of filling but it didn’t give me the energy I needed to carry on my usual Dung Beetle activities. My mom says that I should only eat monkey shit and if I really want to grow big and strong like my Dad, I need to find deer poop or rabbit poop or mouse poop because all of that crap has lots of vegetables in it. It’s hard to tell what is what though because it all looks the same color in the green light of the forest.

One day while I was hiding behind a rock, I saw two humans walking through the forest. They both stopped on the trail and each of them took a shit, right there in front of me. I was the first Dung Beetle on the scene for the wonderful gift they left me. I think both of them were vegetarians because both dumps were green (could have been the lighting though) and both tasted exquisite. One of the hikers had diarrhea though so as an adult beetle I much preferred that shit as I didn’t have to work so hard to squeeze the liquid out of it. The more solid dump, of course, was much easier to break up and roll into little balls. Little balls, which I pulled home to my tunnel. I had great sex with my wife and she laid 74 eggs and put them in the shit balls lining the tunnel. I can hardly wait now for the eggs to hatch so I can welcome our family of larvae into the world.

I hope you enjoyed my story. Such is the life of a Dung Beetle.”