Tswalu Kalahari Reserve is a private game reserve covering 1,020 km(2) in the Northern Cape, South Africa. It has been created from a number of reclaimed farms and restocked with large indigenous mammals. Two surveys were conducted to inventory the dung beetle fauna (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) and determine their spatial patterns and food type associations. The spatial survey used ...

Ivermectin is a veterinary pharmaceutical generally used to control the ecto- and endoparasites of livestock, but its use has resulted in adverse effects on coprophilous insects, causing population decline and biodiversity loss. There is currently no information regarding the direct effects of ivermectin on dung beetle physiology and behaviour. Here, based on electroantennography and spontaneou...

An important concern of paleoethnobotanists is accounting for the presence and charring of seeds recovered archeologically. The possibility that seeds can be brought to a site incorporated in animal dung and charred when that dung is burned as fuel is considered. Researchers have shown that animal dung can contain seeds. Ethnoarcheological data from the rural village of Malyan, Iran demonstrate...

Mammal feces are the primary food and nesting resource for the majority of dung beetle species, and larval development depends on the quantity and quality of that resource. Physiological necessities, competitive interactions, and resource sharing are common and suggest that dung beetles may show preferences for feces of greater nutritional quality, which may in turn impact beetle assemblages an...

the present study was conducted to assess the effect of dung beetles on sheep dung removal and seed dispersal in semi steppe rangelands of shahrekord province with poor condition located in iran. therefore, the large (1 cm2) and small size (1 mm2) meshes were used and filled by sheep dung in six treatments. to evaluate the role of the insects in seeds translocation, three sizes of plastic beads...

BACKGROUND Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) is a vector-borne infectious disease, caused by the protozoan Leishmania donovani, which is transmitted by phlebotomine sand flies. In an earlier study in Bihar, India, we found an association between incidence of VL and housing conditions. In the current study we investigated the influence of housing structure and conditions in and around the house on the...

The overall purpose ofthis paperwas to review the major and most recent literature relating the effects of anthelmintics on dung breeding invertebrates and dung degradation. Faecal residues or metabolites of drugs belonging to the benzimidazole and levamisole/morantel groups are relatively harmless to dung fauna, on the contrary to other anthelmintics such as coumaphos, dichlorvos, phenothiazin...

This is the first record for the subfamily Psychodinae from Ecuador and a new species belonging to genus Arisemus, A. triconnectus, is described.