You know you’ve made it, when you hit page one of the newspaper!
humour
Doug the Dung Beetle’s first book absolutely free
…but only for a short time
Download Doug the Dung Beetle – The long roll home for FREE!
As part of a promotion for the release of Martina’s next kid’s picture book, she wanted to spread the word of me – Doug! So please, if you’ve ever had a twitch to look at my book, but didn’t, here is your opportunity to do so for absolutely free. And as a favour to me, spread the word with your friends by sharing this post. Give them the gift of humour and dung, all in the one neat little package!
But offers like this don’t last forever. So go on, click here to visit NoiseTrade for your free copy (suitable for your Kindle, iPad and more).
Poo-fect bean for the coffee connoisseur
So I was a bit surprised that Marti wasn’t overly excited by the recent present I gave her…
…a bag of Kopi Luwak coffee beans
I thought it would be a nice way of combining her love of all things dung beetle and coffee.
This special coffee bean must first be ingested by the Sumatran luwak (also known as Asian palm civet). They love to eat the ripest coffee bean berries and after the fruit part has been ingested, the hard bean pops out the other end for local farmers to collect. It can then be roasted the traditional way.
Considered the most expensive coffee bean (about $AUD 1 per gram!); it’s obviously one for a true connoisseur to savour. Perhaps an ideal gift for that person who has everything?
Hey, that’s not a dung ball
…it’s a rock!
Found this beautiful picture of a scarab beetle and its prize rock – perhaps he’s working out for his next dung ball battle.
Dung beetles once were Gods
Yep, we were the most powerful insect God in Ancient Egypt
Khepri was his name and sun rolling was his game
The Ancient Egyptians watched my great, great, great, great ancestors as they rolled their dung balls across the hot Egyptian sands. They made a connection between dung ball rolling and the rolling of the sun. It was obvious, the Dung Beetle was the God in charge of the sun!
They believed that every morning Khepri would appear and roll the sun at sun rise. He would then continue rolling the sun across the sky until sunset. Khepri disappeared overnight, but wasn’t resting (dung beetles never rest). He continued with his roll into the underworld and faithfully reappeared the following day at dawn.
He was given the name Khepri, which comes from the word kheper – to emerge or come into being.
To roll or not to roll
….That is the million dollar question.
But the reality is, it’s quite simple for me. Of the three options out there for us dung beetles: roll, dwell or tunnel, rolling is definitely the way to go.
Here are some good reasons to roll:
You get to play ball all day long. Not many people get a job as fun as that.
You get to spend the day in the beautiful outdoors. Tunnellers and dwellers spend time inside. Dwellers live inside the dung and tunnellers dig underground, taking their dung with them.
If you’re really hungry, you can make super dooper balls of dung like the one in the photo of me. And better still, because I’m a roller, I can easily roll it quickly away from other hungry dung beetles. The competition is always fierce. Luckily for me, my species of dung beetle is super strong. We have been observed to lift over 1,000 times our own body weight in dung, so rolling a ball as big as the picture, is easy peasey.
Doug the Dung Beetle 