Dung beetles disperse dung. Ball rollers do this by removing pieces of the pad and rolling it away – it may then be anchored to pieces of vegetation or buried. Tunnellers bury the dung in the ground at depths of between a few centimetres to 1 metre.

This activity serves to:

• Increase soil fertility by returning organic matter and nutrients to the soil
• Nutrients are then available to soil micro-organisms
• Increase soil aeration by creating tunnels into the soil both when burying dung and on emergence of new beetles
• Increase water infiltration into the soil
• Reduce pasture fouling
• Reduce water contamination and algal blooms
• Reduce nutrient run off into dams, streams and waterways
• Reduce bush and buffalo fly numbers - rapid burial of dung pads removes the fly breeding habitat
• Reduce parasite loads by interrupting the life cycle of some internal parasites

Relevance to the Northern Tablelands Livestock Industry

In December, 1993 "Trees and Natural Resources" contained the following information "Australia’s 22 million cattle and 162 million sheep produce at least 54 million tonnes of dung each year, measured in dry weight this is enough to cover 150,000 to 200,000 hectares of productive farming land".

A Conservative estimate is that 1 Dry Sheep Equivalent (DSE) has a faecal loss of 0.8 grams of Phosphorus (P) and 0.53 grams of Nitrogen (N) per day. The Northern New England Rural Lands Protection Board and the Armidale Rural Lands Protection Board have an estimated carrying capacity of 11 420 677 DSE. This equates to 333 tonnes of P and 222 tonnes of N released into the headwaters of the catchments and, while many factors affect the amount of this material making its way into waterways (ground cover, buffer zones, rainfall intensity, volatilisation etc ), the potential for adding nutrients to the waterways is large.

Dung plays a part in the lifecycle of many pest species including bush and buffalo flies. Each cow pad can produce 3000 bushflies over a two week period. Studies have shown that some dung beetle species can reduce the survival of bush and buffalo flies by between 80 and 100 percent.