Why are beetles the weaponry champs?
University of Montana Professor Doug Emlen is passionate about animal weaponry. He’s not alone in a state renowned for six-point bull elk and full-curl bighorn rams. But for Emlen, an evolutionary biologist, his selected choice of study is even more awesome. He focuses on the horns, forks, shovels and spatula weapons of beetles. Here in the hometown of the Boone and Crockett Club, the official record keeper for trophy-sized game animals, Emlen might seem a bit cheeky in his assertion that horned beetles are the weaponry champions — until you take a closer look at the staggering array of the horns’ shapes and sizes. Some dung beetle horns are so massive they make up 15 percent of the beetle’s body weight. By comparison, a mature bull elk may weigh 700 pounds with a set of antlers as heavy as 40 pounds. Elk antlers would have to weigh 105 pounds to live up to beetle proportions. “My research started with figuring out what beetle horns were for,” Emlen says of his work of almost 20 years.
