C'mon

One, two, three, four mmm!

I'm a banker.

I mean, I've seen zombies with more individuality.

What a bunch of followers you guys are.

(Laughter)

That's me, there, that pile of albino mouse droppings.

You're Chihiro, huh?

So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.

It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots.

(Laughter)

And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort.

I wanted to say that, regardless of any of these things we are all precious people

And that's the way most people see it.

There were pigeons roosting in the dish.

And so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way, and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this, because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung.

I don't wanna clean up dog shit.

I do not want to clean up dog poop.

Least you've got guts

Time spent with you is like chasing and catching small birds, but without the scratches and bird shit.

And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung.

And by and large, you'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path.

Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground.

So what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system, and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball.

It's in slow motion. but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it.

There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us.

And what they're doing is very interesting they're digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies.

Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles.

When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, This?

Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls.

This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo.

So this dung pat was actually well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well adapted to rolling balls of dung.

Honorius and the Western Roman Empire were besieged by barbarian hordes from the beginning.

And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball.

You can see it's a male because he's got a little hair on the back of his legs there, and he's clearly very pleased about what he's sitting on there.

Seagulls cause all types of disturbances by cackling loudly, spreading guano, tearing up garbage bags and attacking to get food.

So clearly this animal knows where it's going and it knows where it wants to go, and that's a very, very important thing, because if you think about it, you're at the dung pile, you've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else, and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line.

And third, while they're in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field.

All the six different species rabbits, actually are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another.

He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank clucking, gossiping as chickens will and they make a beeline for the cow patties.

So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they're spreading the manure out.