IUCN COMMISSION GROUP

IUCN SSC Dung Beetle Specialist Group

Overview and description

Description:: Focuses on the families Geotrupidae and Scarabaeidae (subfamilies Aphodiinae and Scarabaeinae), which are insects that rely primarily on dung to feed or reproduce and are commonly known as “dung ...
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Focuses on the families Geotrupidae and Scarabaeidae (subfamilies Aphodiinae and Scarabaeinae), which are insects that rely primarily on dung to feed or reproduce and are commonly known as “dung beetles”. This group of taxa comprises ~6,000 known valid species and forms part of the diverse Superfamily Scarabaeoidea

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Group leadership

Prof Fernando VAZ-DE-MELLO

Co-Chair

Dr Camila LEANDRO RIVEL

Co-Chair

Camila Leandro is an early career post-doc working on insect conservation at French and European scales. She focuses on the question of eDNA inventories and species distribution models to better…

More about the Specialist Group

Dung beetles display a wide range of feeding and breeding strategies that allow them to exploit an ephemeral and patchy resource such as animal droppings. Due to such use of fecal resources and, also, their wide global range, dung beetles have great economic and ecological importance. Indeed, through shredding, burial and dispersal of dung, they play essential functional roles in (1) assisting the recycling of nutrients held in animal wastes, (2) controlling ...

More about the Specialist Group

Coinciding with predictions of an impending 6th mass extinction and along with other flora and fauna, dung beetles are facing multiple threats. In natural ecosystems, many species are threatened by modification, fragmentation and loss of preferred habitat accompanied by changes in the availability of preferred dung types. In agro-ecosystems, population density is threatened by over-application of livestock pesticides. Climate change represents an additional potential major threat to dung beetles.

Moreover, despite the fact that dung beetles have extensively been used in recent decades as an indicator group for assessing impacts of environmental change on biodiversity ecosystem functioning as well as assessing ecosystem restoration success (mainly in Tropical forest regions), we still have not produced comprehensive species red lists for most areas. Even for the whole of Europe, gaps still remain in taxonomic inventory with many datasets that must be updated.

Priorities vary from region to region. However, general actions proposed by the SG to reduce the impact of these treats to dung beetles are:

Completion of alpha taxonomy to establish full species lists and understand knowledge gaps;
Gather existing distributional data to determine ranges and changes in ranges;
Compilation of IUCN red list assessments of species comprising new assessments and revision of previously assessed species if needed;
Assessment of ecological associations and responses to better understand the drivers of declines in diversity and abundance: monitor further future changes in dung beetle diversity;
Raise general public and farmers awareness of the negative effects of habitat loss and farming practices (particularly use of veterinary products) on dung beetle diversity;
Create durable partnerships between dung beetle experts, conservationists and professionals from the agricultural world.

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Specialist Group work

Our key activities would be to use the organizational structure to address the key conservation issues, first by highlighting the importance of dung beetles to wide audiences and agricultural professionals, assessing species risk to extinction and collaborating together on how to enhance landscape management in partnership to sustain diversity and ecosystem functionality. For the short-mid term goals, we focus on four “main chapters”:

Raising public awareness about dung beetle ecological importance :

First, we would like to develop social media content to raise awareness on dung beetle diversity, importance and research on the field. We are aiming for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Filling the communication gap between scientists and farmers

Here we will first need to provide information for farmers in order to raise their awareness of the key role of dung beetles in agricultural ecosystems an to popularize the message of dung beetle conservation (their usefulness, the main threats to them posed by current agricultural practices, the main practical things to do to create a dung beetle friendly farm, etc.). To do this, we can learn from the “Dung beetles for farmers” initiative and similar actions led more locally in France (PlaceNett project), Australia (Dung beetle project) and South Africa.

Networking

We must improve communication and knowledge sharing between dung beetle specialists, inside or outside academia. Not only we will create a shared space for collaboration and discussion internally (tool to be chosen), but we would like to have regular workshops in which, for specific topics (i.e. “education programs”, “farmer-academia interactions”, “lobbying and law change”, “forest conservation”...) colleagues that would have tried to tackle those issues/challenges, whatever the scale, can share their experiences to others and discuss on how to better take decisions in projects aiming for those topics.
Moreover, we would like to update or re-create a dung beetle expert directory (based on the example of the Scarab Network) in which fields and regions of expertise and contact information can be available to anybody willing to reach a dung beetle expert or enthousiast.

Redlisting

In the short term, we would like to assess groups recently taxonomically revised with enough data distribution or endemics (easier to assess at the global level); some candidates are South-African species, South-American species, and maybe, with a compilation effort and a team in charge of create a solid network, European species.

We would like to find funding in order to Revise Museum Collections with Dung beetle curators. This funding could help organize workshops to revise specimens and gather distribution data and also a coordinator of this (specific contract). In the long run we hope to assess and compile recent taxonomic revisions (genus, species, tribes, etc).