Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals ? and occasionally other organisms ? from around the world
Species: Trichothurgus bolithophilus
Habitat: The bush steppes of Patagonia, taking home-ownership to a new low
People can be sentimental about their homes. Think of Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, happily chirruping that "there's no place like home" to get herself sent back to Kansas ? even though, as far as she knows, her beloved dog was due to be put down as soon as she returns.
Animals aren't as dewy-eyed as Dorothy, but their homes are no less important to them. Nests provide refuge for parents and offspring alike, protecting them both from the elements and from predators. So, animals will seize the chance to set up home anywhere, from hollow tree trunks to deep within caves.
Newly discovered in Argentina, the bee Trichothurgus bolithophilus has a rather less salubrious lifestyle. Seemingly eschewing soil, plants and rocks, it makes its home in networks of tunnels dug into dried-out piles of horse dung.
Pimp my pad
T. bolithophilus is only the fourteenth member of the still small Trichothurgus genus, which itself belongs to a group called the Lithurgini. Forget the complex lifestyles of the familiar honeybees, with their colonies, workers and queens: these are primitive bees that live a solitary existence in their dung palaces.
Exploring the bush steppes of Patagonia, Laura Sarzetti of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and colleagues found six dried-out horse droppings, called pads, each of which had been partially hollowed out. These were T. bolithophilus nests.
When Sarzetti broke the manure pads open, she found that the six nests were all quite different from each other. Three had single main tunnels, either straight or with gentle bends, with two or three nest chambers branching off. Another just had a curving tunnel with no separate nest chambers, while in the fifth nest the main tunnel bent back on itself.
The sixth nest was by far the most complex. A single main tunnel, with a kink halfway down, branched out into six nest chambers. A seventh branch curved back on itself, so that it came to a dead end just above the main tunnel.
Within the nest chambers, Sarzetti found eggs and larvae. They had been supplied with pollen from daisies and pigweeds, both of which are common on the Patagonian steppes.
No place like dung
T. bolithophilus is the first bee known to nest in dung, but others have been found. Unpublished research by the US Department of Agriculture shows that two species of mason bee, which normally nest in soil, sometimes nest in dried cattle dung in Wyoming.
Nevertheless it's unusual. Many animals rely on dung for food ? the dung beetle
being an obvious example ? but few go so far as to live in it. "Some dung beetles construct brood balls within the food source," says Sarzetti, but they don't dig tunnels.
Manure is pretty scarce in T. bolithophilus's neighbourhood: the only animals that provide decent-sized pads are horses, which were only recently introduced on the Patagonian steppes and are still uncommon. In any case, the dung seems like an odd place to transform into a home.
Crappy protection
For one thing, pads of manure don't make for particularly secure homes. They are fragile, so might get blown around and broken by strong winds. Their thin outer layers provide little protection for larvae in the freezing Patagonian winters. These drawbacks lead Sarzetti to think that the bees only started nesting in dung recently, trying them for size when their usual lodgings weren't available.
We don't know where T. bolithophilus normally nests, says Sarzetti, but there are plenty of cactuses in the area that the bees could burrow into. There are also "cushion plants", which look like mosses and have a similar texture to dung.
Perhaps, if they want to go back to living in comfy plants, they should try clicking their hind legs together.
Journal reference: Journal of Hymenoptera Research, doi.org/jjp
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