Chemical cues, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), are often essential for insects to locate food. Relative the volume of studies on role VOCs in insect-plant relationships, emitted by dung and carrion mediating behavior insect decomposers is understudied. Such relationships may provide a mechanistic understanding temporal axis community assembly processes decomposing communities. We foc...

Considering the turmoil and vast changes in the classification of the superfamily Scarabaeoidea during the last 20 years, particularly in North America, we were asked to provide an update for the readers of Scarabs wherein we offer our perspectives. Much of what follows is extracted from our scarabaeoid introduction in American Beetles (Jameson and Ratcliffe 2002). By the time this overview is ...

The dung beetles (Scarabaeinae) include ca. 5000 species and exhibit a diverse array of morphologies and behaviors. This variation presumably reflects the adaptation to a diversity of food types and the different strategies used to avoid competition for vertebrate dung, which is the primary breeding environment for most species. The current classification gives great weight to the major behavio...

During their feeding process, dung beetles perform a series of ecosystem functions that provide valuable services, such as soil fertilization, improvement properties, plant growth enhancement, and biological pest control. However, in the grasslands Central Asian dry steppe, effects on removal remain almost unstudied. Here, we examined by different beetle species (Colobterus erraticus (Linnaeus,...

Dung beetles are exposed to a complex microbiological ecosystem during their life cycle. Characterization of novel host-defense peptides (HDP) is essential to understanding the host innate immune response in insects. It constitutes a promising alternative to look for new therapeutic agents against pathogenic microbes. We identified four new HDP, Oxysterlins 1, 2, 3, and 4 from the transcriptome...