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[sjc <indexer AT fairpoint.net>]

roxann wrote:
> Sage, that would make a great video for your blog! I've never seen a dung 
> beetle, don't know if we have them here. My fav beetle from childhood 
> (s.louisiana) was something we called a cop-cop beetle. If you pressed on 
> them at the juncture between throax and abdomen, they'd pop! into the air. 
> Then they could crawl away. It looked like they had huge eyes painted on 
> them, but it was just a decoy. I haven't seen any of those in a long time, 
> even out here where there is plenty old trees and decaying wood for them to 
> eat. Maybe they don't live this far from the coast.
>   
That would be one of the click beetles (family elateridae, if I remember 
right) of which there are thousands of sorts.  Several of them have the 
'predator-scare eyes.  Cool to play with.  We don't have the eyed ones 
here, but do have several all-brown and all-black sorts.

We had dung beetles in the midwest where I grew up.  My brother and I 
got a fierce whalin' one time for "ranching ****-rollers" in the dust in 
the lane.  He was the blue-shirt rancher, who had brown 'cows' (rollers) 
and I was the green-shirt rancher, whose cows were black.  At the time 
we got caught our cows were racing between lines in the dust.....with 
their balls, since we couldn't get them to race without their balls.

We were supposed to be getting jimpson weeds out of the bean field...

That's what happens when you depend on a bunch of kids to run the place. 
:-)

SJ, where it's cold but sunny