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Can’t get enough of the poo

- By Erna van Wyk

Tonight you will hear about small animals that play around in poo, says Professor Marcus Byrne.

With this, Professor Marcus Byrne started off his inaugural lecture delivered in the Senate Room at Wits University on Tuesday, 14 April 2015, following his promotion last year to Personal Professor in Zoology in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences.

Thirty years ago he encountered this enigmatic insect that would “entertain” him, and in turn let him to entertain many others, in the name of science: the dung beetle.

It’s all about the poo

Since he joined Wits in 1987 Byrne had used dung beetles effectively as a vehicle to show evolution at its best. “It is a particularly good vehicle because of its relationship with poo,” Byrne chuckled. “It simply loves its poo and cannot get enough of it.”

“There are over 800 species in South Africa, 2 000 in Africa and 6 000 in the world. And only about 10% roll dung!” Byrne said.

Science makes up for our flaws

As a child growing up in the UK with its “limited fauna”, Byrne’s love for science was sparked by watching the great science communicator, David Attenborough, on television. In his own right, Byrne is an exceptional science communicator. His TEDx talk has attracted over 900 000 hits and with his team was awarded the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for Astronomy and Biology.

“Science is something we should all be very passionate about. It is a way of describing the world around us – a very new way (from about the 1600s) – and it is an impartial process. Humans are very flawed observers. We have biases of our own that make us interpret what we see in the world in the way that we want to see it.

No small, insignificant animal

“And if we use animals with very small brains and then ask questions about the world around us, then we can actually get a different interpretation of that world and in some respect get a clearer view of the world that we wish to investigate,” he said.

He highlighted how science is “an impartial system, a system that is not a dogma, not a creed – it is a self-correcting system. The challenge of doing science is that you are continually asked to overturn the questions and the answers that you receive. You are asked to question that system and that is what makes it so powerful. Knowing the world in a most truthful way as we possibly can without that biased we assume”.

His research with dung beetles has over the past few years shed light on navigation and orientation behaviour in dung beetles. With his colleagues and students he has made some amazing discoveries:

“For a small insignificant animal – that I don’t think that they are – dung beetles can do amazing things, showing evolution at its best,” he said.

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