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Over the past two decades, field trips in search of dung beetles have taken University of Pretoria (UP) doctoral student Christian Deschodt across Southern Africa. But it was a well-trodden walk to fetch his kids from school, a mere 1,5km from his home near Hartbeespoort, that saw him stumble upon an entirely new species.

This was just one of two new species that was recently described by Deschodt, who has been involved in the discovery and description of more than 50 new dung beetle species.

News about the species, named Hathoronthophagus spinosa, spotted on his stroll was announced in Zootaxa, a scientific journal that specialises in updates about the discovery of new species. Deschodt, together with his PhD supervisor, Professor Catherine Sole of UP’s Department of Zoology and Entomology, also placed the species in a new genus, Hathoronthophagus.

“We live near Hartbeespoort Dam on a small piece of land, some 30km from UP’s Hatfield campus,” Deschodt says. “After a morning of research work, I like to stretch my legs by taking a walk to fetch my two children from primary school.”

Never did he imagine that walking along that particular gravel farm road would allow him to combine work with his parental duties. In January 2023, Deschodt set off to fetch his children. It had rained the previous day. About 500 metres into the walk, he spotted a tiny chocolate brown dung beetle less than 5mm in size amid a hoard of common pugnacious ants. No dung was to be seen, as would be expected when dung beetles are around.

Careful not to squash it, he carried the specimen to the school and back home where, after a quick look at it under the microscope, he realised it was the female of a species that he’d never seen before. He named it after ‘Hathor’, an ancient Egyptian deity associated with joy, love, women, fertility and maternal care.

“She was often portrayed as a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns,” Deschodt explains, “which reminded me of the longish horns of Hathoronthophagus spinosa.”

Deschodt has since had no luck in tracking down more specimens, despite having put out lures baited with cattle dung and extensively examining ant nests around Hartbeespoort. He believes this particular species of dung beetle may live in ant nests, and may be providing a mutually beneficial service to its fellow insects. Incidentally, other dung beetles that have antennas with eight segments, like Hathoronthophagus spinosa, have such a relationship with ants. More work will have to be done to confirm this hypothesis.

“I hope that news about this find will at least prompt other experts working in Southern Africa to explore the relatively unknown relationship between ants and dung beetles more intensively,” he says.

There are about 500 species of dung beetle in South Africa, and more than 700 in all Southern African countries, including South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, southern Mozambique and Zimbabwe. According to Deschodt, this diversity is partly due to South Africa’s hugely varied geography and range of vegetation types, from fynbos to succulents, thickets and savannas.

He says many species of dung beetles are specific about the type of dung they use. For instance, some are only found using elephant or rhinoceros dung. For his PhD, Deschodt is working on a flightless genus found in the arid parts of Namibia and western South Africa that only keeps to rock hyrax (‘dassie’) dung pellets.

It is also a fallacy that dung beetles only feed on faeces, despite what their common name might infer. Some species have been seen scavenging on dead frogs and chicken livers, or feeding on different types of mushrooms.

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