The Wonderful Dung Beetle

Wording of this Handout:

---

Elephants eat a lot! And when they finish with their food they can do as much as 20 pounds of dung (about 10 kg). That's one large pile!

Now if you think of all the hundreds of elephants in Africa, all leaving 20 pounds of dung, and add up how much dung they would drop over just a few days, you can see that Africa might become rather smelly after awhile!

But God has designed ways of getting rid of all this dung.

One way is called the dung beetle.

Within minutes of the elephant dropping its dung, the beetles come flying in. They roll the dung into balls and push it away to suitable places, then they dig holes in the ground and push or pull the dung ball down - sometimes as deep as a metre.

Then the lay an egg in the ball and go away.

When the egg hatches, the grub eats the dung - and burrows back to the surface to fly away and start doing the same as its parent.

So God has designed a very efficient way of looking after a beetle and also keeping the ground clean of dung.

God is a Master designer who thinks of everything!