What animals does dog poop attract?
Dog poop attracts rodents such as rats and mice. Inside the excrement, there are usually bits of food that can be a valuable resource to rodents. You won’t see them in the day because rodents come out at night.
Not only is dog poop a potential health hazard, but it may attract unwanted rodents. Termites and carpenter ants: Two problems we see a lot of at this time of year are wood-destroying insects such as termites, carpenter ants and carpenter bees.
They eat the dung of herbivores and omnivores, and prefer that produced by the latter. Many of them also feed on mushrooms and decaying leaves and fruits. One type living in Central America, Deltochilum valgum, is a carnivore preying upon millipedes.
Q: Do dung beetles have predators? A: Yes. Ibis, crows, foxes and other vertebrates find dung beetles to be both delicious and nutritious. But these predators are unlikely to have a significant effect on your beetle populations once they are well established.
How do you get rid of dung beetles?
Insecticides and dewormers such as abamectin, ivermectin, eprinomectin, and doramectin kill flies and dung beetles in manure. High stock density grazing favors dung beetles by supplying many manure pats in a small area for easy colonization.
In the great scheme of things, insects that eat dung or carrion are considered scavengers (saprophages)—part of the clean-up crew. Scatophagous insects usually attend the droppings of larger vertebrates rather than those of their fellow invertebrates, undoubtedly harvesting the microorganisms present in the decomposing organic material, and many lay their eggs there so their offspring can enjoy the feast.
We have met the Alydidae before, in the form of the Lupine bug. They’re called Broad-headed bugs because their head is wider than their pronotum, the shield that covers the first section of their thorax. It’s not a huge family, about 300 species worldwide, with most living in sandy areas, dry woods, grasslands, edges, and roadsides in the tropics and subtropics.
But coprophagy is an uncommon proclivity in the Hemipterans. In a paper published in 1980, researcher Carl W. Schaefer said “I suspect that the bugs are attracted [to dung and carrion] both by water and by concentrated semiliquid protein, but there is no clear evidence that any of the alydines feed primarily on carrion.” The BugLady found a paper that described a (successful) attempt to trap a species of Broad-headed bug that is crop pest using dead fish as bait.
Coprophagous insects (poop-eaters) are decomposers/recyclers. It’s a lifestyle for some species, but others, like these primarily-vegetarian Broad-headed bugs, just dabble in coprophagy. The BugLady frequently sees squash bug nymphs on leaves splattered with bird poop. (Here’s a Lupine bug on bird droppings.) The whitewash contains uric acid, and feeding on it, a form of coprophagy, provides innsects a vital source of nitrogen needed for growth. Apparently, a few species of plant bugs even live in bird nests, where they’re close to the source. Herbivores/grazers don’t have super-efficient digestive systems, so what comes out the rear end resembles, nutritionally, what went in the front end, and there’s a lot to glean from their droppings. Carnivores’ guts do better, but even their dung offers nutrients.
They are slender, up to a half-inch long, and generally dark-colored, and many have long legs. What the BugLady didn’t see, because their wings were folded, was the red-orange color on the top side of the abdomen that warns predators to reconsider. (You can barely see it here.) When alarmed, these bugs produce a nasty odor. Like all Hemipterans, they have piercing mouthparts and a forewing that is proximally leathery and distally membranous. The nymphs are ant-mimics (another common name is “ant bug”), so now the BugLady will have to check all the ants she sees on vegetation.