How specialized are dung beetles for different dung types? A few years ago, dung beetle preferences were mostly studied with baited pitfall traps using easily available feces from livestock or zoo animals. Now we can unravel the “real” dung-beetle networks by looking into the beetles’ guts to identify DNA from each mammal that provided the dung. Karen Pedersen has established and now published the method in PeerJ along with first results. Dung beetles are more specialized than expected. Noctural dung beetles forage on jaguar or puma feces while diurnal beetles rather follow the groups of monkeys.
