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An army of beetles has been released into South Canterbury pastures with a unique call of duty.
Over the next decade, hundreds of dung beetles will spend their days living in manure in a bid to clean up waterways in the 34 sq. km Barkers Creek catchment.
They’ll eat, bury and lay eggs in the dung to ensure contaminants don’t pile up in paddocks and risk running into waterways.
The unexpected weapons for improving soil and water quality have been shipped from a breeding centre in Auckland to the South Canterbury area, which is largely rolling terrain with heavy clay soils.
Since February last year, they’ve come in batches. The last batch of dung beetles is due to arrive in late May.
The Barkers Creek Catchment Group Chair, Danette McKeown, said like most environmental mitigations, the dung beetles weren’t a quick fix but rather a long-term solution.
“We probably won’t know if the beetles have established for a couple of years, and then it’s more like seven years before we’ll know how much impact they are having.”
The Group was allocated funding by the Ōrāri Temuka Ōihi Pareora (OTOP) Water Zone Committee to purchase the dung beetles, which were being released at ten different farms.
Danette said she expected farm owners should see a critical population of dung beetles in their paddocks in a few years, and by then, dung should start rapidly disappearing.
“We’ve picked four species that would be suitable for our soils. We’ve picked the four seasons package, which means we have species of beetles that will be active in spring, summer, winter and autumn.”
Dung beetles and their role in agriculture
Each year, cattle, sheep, alpacas, deer and horses deposit more than 100 million tonnes of manure onto our pastures. The more dung piling up in paddocks, the higher the risk of it running into our waterways.
The dung beetles offer a unique solution:
- They dine on the manure of these grazing animals before tunnelling beneath it and filling their burrows with balls of dung, in which they lay their eggs.
- The piles of dung quickly disappear, broken down into the soils below.
- One dung beetle can bury 250 times its own weight in a night.
Introduced dung beetles don’t harm native species
In most parts of the world, the beetles are strongly connected to livestock, but not in New Zealand, as modern farming was only introduced 150 years ago.
Although we have native beetles, they have adapted to a forest environment and don’t provide any support in processing manure in our pastoral system.
To combat the gap in our ecosystem, a company in Auckland introduced different species of dung beetles from Africa and Europe to New Zealand for breeding in 2011.
As our native beetles live in forests, the imported beetles won’t be competing for habitats.
