Veterinary pharmaceuticals excreted in the dung of treated livestock can have strong non-target effects on the dung organism community. We report results of ecotoxicological tests with ivermectin for 21 species of temperate (Europe, North America) and tropical (Asia, Central America) black scavenger flies (Diptera: Sepsidae), using standardized methods developed previously for the yellow dung f...

At midday, surface temperatures in the desert often exceed 60°C. To be active at this time, animals need extraordinary behavioural or physiological adaptations. Desert ants, for instance, spend up to 75% of their foraging time cooling down on elevated thermal refuges such as grass stalks. Ball-rolling dung beetles work under similar thermal conditions in South African savannahs. After landing a...

Lepidoptera feed at mud puddles, dung, and carrion in a behavior known as puddling. Sodium and sometimes protein are feeding cues, are actively collected, and play a potentially important role in lepidopteran nutritional and mating ecology. We showed that montane butterßy species have feeding preferences among mud, herbivore dung, and carnivore dung, and that these preferences differed among bu...

In recent decades, pastoral abandonment has produced profound ecological changes in the Alps. In particular, the reduction in grazing has led to extensive shrub encroachment of semi-natural grasslands, which may represent a threat to open habitat biodiversity. To reverse shrub encroachment, we assessed short-term effects of two different pastoral practices on vegetation and dung beetles (Coleop...

Background Ruminant dung is a highly ephemeral, patchily distributed resource, which is utilized by a diverse community of invertebrate species. This ecologically important community may be affected adversely by insecticide and endectocide residues in the faeces of treated cattle. The aim of the present work was to quantify the aggregation of the insects colonising cow-dung in cattle pastures a...

INTRODUCTION Cow dung known since long ago for its germicidal properties, used by Indian villagers to clean the house premises. As cow dung is not available easily, nowadays people have started using synthetic yellow coloured powder (Auramine-o) available easily in grocery shops locally known as "Morechap powder" in districts of Maharashtra. As the poisoning is rare, very few literatures are av...

This study was aimed to screen the lignocellulolytic ability of selected fungi under laboratory conditions. In presence of lignin and hemicellulose will reduce the activity of cellulase. Wild type fungal strains which have cellulolytic activity along with lignolytic activity, hemicellulolytic activity, were isolated from different animal dung manure soils collected from Sri Venkateswara Go Samr...

A study of dung beetles rolling dung balls to safety reveals unexpected facets of the beetle's acquisition and use of celestial information for keeping to a straight path.

Producing biofuels such as ethanol from non-food plant material has the potential to meet transportation fuel requirements in many African countries without impacting directly on food security. The current shortcomings in biomass processing are inefficient fermentation of plant sugars, such as xylose, especially at high temperatures, lack of fermenting microbes that are able to resist inhibitor...