I Saw Poop Move And So Can You.

It was a first for me. There I was just minding my own business taking Lela for a walk. I've never seen poop move. "Why is it moving?" "I hope answering the question of why doesn't require me to pick up the poop." "Oh man, I don't even want to think about what would happen if Lela sees this poop moving. She might actually try to eat it thinking it was some kind of small animal." "Would I have to brush her teeth if she actually ate the poop?" "Would it make her throw up?" "Would I throw up?" "What if we both throw up?" "Would it be worse if it was her old poop or some other dogs poop?" Lucky for me, Lela wasn't as interested in the moving poop as the sentient being next to her. I wonder if this degree of wonderment will ever leave me. I vividly remember the moving leaves of Panama. A highway full of small leaves, marching to the beat of their own drummer, dribbling along the ground from bush to underground fortress. The leaves were at the mercy of what I considered Super Ants and later Army Ants (really called Leaf Cutter Ants).


http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/animals/images/800/leaf-cutter-ant.jpg

I imagined the bunker was the size of our house with the walls constructed completely of green leafy paper. Their city probably had all of the facets of any city: government, stores, homes, and even that horrible thing called school. I wondered about their holidays and if they had weekends or a beach to go to. But, as I later learned in life, the most important question I asked that afternoon during my childhood was, "Why?"

So, why was this poop moving? Okay, so I have to be honest. I was really hoping for see the really cool Dung Beetle of Africa.


http://www.south-africa-tours-and-travel.com/images/flightless-dung-beetle-mike-gerhardt-addoelephantnationalpark.jpg

But, I had to settle for some kind of local beetle bench pressing the poop. The beetle was huge, about the size of those damn bluetooth headsets that people run around with sticking out of their ears. On a side note, I have a theory that those people are actually aliens using those damn bluetooth headsets to translate our language into their native tongue. Let it go, it's a working theory. Back to the case at hand, moving poop equals large beetle getting in an afternoon workout...don't fall into the trap of immediately jumping to African Dung Beetle, as you just might be mistaken.

Taxonomy Spoiler: In actuality, the African Dung Beetle and the beetle I found earlier this afternoon belong to the same scientific family and subfamily, Scarab (Scarabaeidea and Scarabaeinea...yes, you can put that many vowels into the same word, thank you Latin). This means the two beetles are related and one might even consider the beetle I found today to be a North American Dung Beetle.