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Build Your Own Feces Air Conditioner
The next time the thermostat hits the triple digits outside, instead of paying a high electric bill for the month, take a page out of the dung beetle‘s playbook and try cooling off with some fresh feces instead.
Researchers have discovered that dung beetles use their dung balls to keep themselves cool as they push a weight of up to 50 times heavier than their own bodies across the hot sand.
“Like an air conditioning unit, the moist ball is cooled by evaporative cooling,” said Jochen Smolka of Lund University.
Experiments showed that this only held true when the beetles were crossing hot ground, and that the insects even climb on their balls seven times as often than those on cooler ground.
“The beetles climb on top of their moist balls whenever their front legs and heads overheat,” writes Prof. Marcus Byrne from University of the Witwatersrand. “We stumbled upon this behavior by accident while watching for an ‘orientation dance’ which the beetles perform on top of their balls to work out where they’re going. We noticed that they climbed their balls much more often in the heat of the midday sun.”
This is the first time scientists have observed insects using feces as an air conditioning method. READMOREHERE
