Image courtesy of Sharp Photography.
The notion that the services provided by bugs have a dollar value associated with them is not entirely new, but it has not been much applied to bugs other than pollinators like bees. While the removal of faeces from fields might not have quite the same appeal as pollinating the flowers of fruit trees, it is just as important. Now new work is revealing precisely how important it is by calculating the monetary value of the humble dung beetle. Aside from making fields better for cattle to graze, they also carry valuable anti-fungal chemicals in their saliva that we have only just started to learn about. Read on in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.