Call of Nature The Secret Life of Dung Richard Jones
Download As PDF : Call of Nature The Secret Life of Dung Richard Jones 
Journey through the digestive systems of humans, farm and wild animals, and meet some of nature’s ultimate recyclers as they eat, breed in and compete for dung. The fall of bodily waste onto the ground is the start of a race against the clock as a multitude of dung-feeders and scavengers consume this rich food source. From the enigmatic dung-rolling beetles to bat guano and giant elephant droppings, dung creates a miniature ecosystem to be explored by the aspiring dung watcher.
The author completes the book with an identification guide to dung itself, so that you can identify the animal that left it behind. Pellets or pats? Scats, spraints, frass, guano, spoor – learn your way around different species’ droppings. There’s also a dung-feeder’s identification guide that includes the species you’re most likely to encounter on an exploration of the dung heap.
Editorial reviews
"This book is a true gem and one that opened up a whole new world of natural history to me.... a best practice example of scientific writing." --Clive Herbert, London Naturalist
"I love this book. Packed with scatological gems, it is a magnificent, highly entertaining and beautifully illustrated guide to the world of excrement. No bookshelf could be complete without it." --Professor Dave Goulson, Author of A Sting in the Tale, Founder of Bumblebee Conservation Trust
"We all know that s**t happens. It's what happens to it afterwards that is really important - a beautiful book about the biological poetry of dung, droppings, scat and frass." --Nick Baker
"This book would make a great addition to any entomologist's bookshelf and a thought-provoking read for anyone simply curious about cr*p. I'm just glad it's not scratch-and-sniff." --Alex Evans, Biosphere Magazine
"This is a most thought-provoking, well-researched, well-illustrated and informative book full of interesting facts by a well-known author who knows his subject and, whilst obviously appealing to the dedicated coleopterist or dipterist, it also cannot help but be appreciated by the general entomologist." --John W. Phillips, British Journal of Entomology and Natural History
Call of Nature The Secret Life of Dung Richard Jones
The faint of heart be warned: this is a book about mammal excreta and the insects that use it. Within that sphere it is lively, chatty, and with much educated and very British humor. Images of tweedy tenured professors, dressed in their Sunday finest, diving into cow pies in the English countryside are too good to pass up. Lots of good science here.Product details
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Call of Nature The Secret Life of Dung Richard Jones Reviews
This is a wonderful book--for the right reader. Some readers may think it's gross, some may find the author's very evident Britishness a bit much, but if you are interested in dung, this may be your book.
Understand that it is not about dung, it's about life in the stuff. There are quite wide regional variations, and also by season, humidity and temperature. Most of the book is essentially entomology, about dung beetles, flies and other creatures that recycle dung. It really is a serious subject because the volume from farming, ranching and wildlife is huge, and it's important in supplying nutrients in the soil. And not just the soil, whales that feed in the ocean deeps defecate nearer the surface and their dung contributes a great deal to sea fertility (this is not covered much in the book).
The author specializes in dung beetles (the most famous are the Egyptian scarabs, based on a dung beetle) but the life in scats includes predators, parasites and much more, and there are something like 9,000 to 10,000 species of the dung beetles alone. One experiment cited 1.5 kg of elephant dung "spirited away" in under two hours by 16,000 beetles--somebody apparently managed a count.
Dung has had a lot of uses. Cow dung dried can be a fuel, and can also be used as a construction material, made into bricks or used wattle and daub style. Different creatures' dung has different aspects (chapter 13 is a guide to dung types). Dog dung was once used in tanning leather. Bat guano is a main resource for cave ecosystems. Climate has something to do with it elephant dung may be recycled in a matter of hours and reindeer dung (because of cold, dryness and other factors) may last 5,000 years.
Also the book considers one interesting ecological disruption I'd never heard of before. Australia had no cattle until colonization came, and then came immense numbers of cattle but the native insects had no ability to recycle the dung, and the very rapid accumulation created real problems in managing pasture, so the attempted solution was to introduce dung beetles--which seems to have worked., one imported creature helping solve problems caused by another.
The end of the book has several sort of guide chapters. Chapter 12 has a "rogues gallery" of dung inhabitants and feeders. Another chapter has a guide to dung types, with illustrations (line drawings, not very helpful), and another chapter has a dung glossary. The illustrations are interesting but almost all are line drawings.
The faint of heart be warned this is a book about mammal excreta and the insects that use it. Within that sphere it is lively, chatty, and with much educated and very British humor. Images of tweedy tenured professors, dressed in their Sunday finest, diving into cow pies in the English countryside are too good to pass up. Lots of good science here.
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