Until a few decades ago, you couldn't sit outside a cafe in Canberra without swarms of flies descending on your meal. Happily, that's all changed thanks to the humble dung beetle. These insects also help enrich the soil and farmers in the Canberra region are being encouraged to introduce more of them.
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00:00 Each one of those cows drops around 12 cow pads a day and each cow pad averages about
00:19 1.5 kilograms of dung.
00:21 So in total each day we have close to half a million tonnes of cow dung being dropped
00:28 on the continent each day.
00:36 There are certainly some species of dung beetle in this and that's Taurus.
00:41 The bigger one's Taurus.
00:43 Dung beetles are a pretty important tool for being able to improve soil biology and soil
00:50 health.
00:51 They take the dung, create tunnels and take the dung down underground.
00:55 So you're building up nutrients, you're building air porosity, you're also allowing water to
01:02 be able to penetrate into the soil.
01:07 The small fawn coloured beetle is called Vulvus.
01:11 It comes from France and Spain.
01:18 The soil filters out all the nasty chemicals and we end up with much cleaner, clearer water
01:24 in the creeks, rivers, estuaries and oceans.
01:27 In fact in my opinion there is nothing that water catchment authorities could do that
01:33 would be more efficient than supporting dung beetle releases in their water catchment areas.
01:38 I think the more farmers know about it and they're aware of the great value of the dung
01:45 beetles, the more they come on board.
01:48 It really only takes a handful of farmers in each district in the ACT for the beetles
01:54 to be able to build up their numbers.
01:56 Very competitive.
01:57 They will steal dung from another species or another pair of beetles of the same species.
02:02 I can walk around some cattle properties where there are thousands of head of cattle.
02:07 There are no bush flies in the summer months, no buffalo fly and no dung in the paddocks.
02:14 So after 50 years of working with dung beetles it's a very satisfying experience.
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