One elephant may sustain 2 million dung beetles in East African savannas on any given day

Abstract

In East African savannas, in the rainy season, an elephant dung bolus is usually transformed into a flat mat of dung residue within a few hours. We extracted the coprophilous beetles of a dung mat from a 1 kg bolus after a one-night exposure and counted 13,699 specimens, most of them aphodiine dung beetles. This is the largest number of dung beetles per kilogram of mammal dung ever counted. Given that an elephant produces an average of 160 kg of feces per day, we extrapolate that one adult elephant provides food for 2.12 million dung beetles on any given day. The elephant population in the Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem in central Kenya, an elephant-rich environment, can sustain, by sheer extrapolation, 14.3 billion dung beetles in an area of 55,000 km², which translates to ca. 260,000 dung beetles/km². The decline or extinction of elephants, at least in East African grasslands, may have a massive cascade effect on the populations of coprophagous beetles and the biota dependent on or gaining an advantage from them.