Some mean-looking outlaws are in a showdown to snag this year's Ugly Bug title, with the blood-sucking bedbug, dung beetle and a sinister wasp that hatches deadly larvae contending for a top spot.

Instead of chewing, these beetles suck and strain at their food. Oosenchikogane have a preference for cow dung. The larvae eat the fiber of dung as well as the juices and have chewing mouthparts.

Maggots, earthworms, various flies and larvae all were finding a meal among the “meadow muffins,” as Moon affectionately calls them. Not many dung beetles (like this one) were captured during ...

Perhaps a more beneficent bacterium, within the nematodes that live with the dung beetles’, could help the beetles’ larvae. “Given an estimated million species of nematodes, most of them yet ...

Dung beetles have also been found to improve soil conditions, to suppress E. coli in blueberry fields, and to feed on harmful fly larvae in pastures. [Like the Science Times page on Facebook.

Female dung beetles use their weight and horns to fight ... Females create a 'brood ball' for each egg, so that when the larva hatches, it has an instant source of nutrients from the dung.

Artificial cow pats were made using faeces collected elsewhere and were manipulated by adding dung beetles and varying simulated rainfall. After two weeks, parasitic larvae were taken from ...

The researchers focused on a group of dung beetles with horns in the genus Onthophagus. They were surprised to find that when they inactivated a certain gene, the beetle larvae developed into ...

dung beetles have a wonderful life cycle. First there is an egg. (Or does the beetle come first?) The egg hatches into a larva within a brood ball. The larva sheds its skin around three times ...

Rhino beetles do not roll dung balls but lay their eggs into warm decomposing vegetation where their larvae can be found in large numbers. Perhaps one of the main reasons that there appear to be ...

Dung beetles are creatures of the soil. There, they bury dung and recycle it by feeding on it, both as larvae and as adults. As a representative of the numerous insect species living in the soil ...