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Dung Beetles Animal Themes

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Dung Beetles
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 5 to 8
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	6.63

Vocabulary

challenging words:

assistance, tunneller, tunnellers, beetle, directly, mainly, hatches, crucial, feces, benefits, increase, neither, such, population, construct, saying

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Other Languages
     Spanish: Escarabajo del Estiércol

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Dung Beetles

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¹     There is one animal that takes the saying "One person's junk is another person's treasure" to the extreme. That animal is the dung beetle.
 
²     Dung beetles eat manure, the smelliest and dirtiest junk that any animal makes! Most of us might say "Yuck!" when we learn of dung beetles' peculiar taste. Yet, this habit of dung beetles is so crucial that Earth would look completely different without them. Here are the benefits that dung beetles bring to our planet, to name just a few:
 
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• By cleaning up manure from the surface, dung beetles make Earth a nicer place to live.
• By removing animal waste from the ground, dung beetles keep the population of pests that breed inside animals' droppings (such as flies) in check.
• By burying animal feces underground, dung beetles fertilize soil and increase pasture yields.

Paragraphs 4 to 7:
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Animal Themes

Animal Themes

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Insects

Insects

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Animals

Amphibians         Birds         Deserts         Fish         Freshwater         Grasslands         Insects

Invertebrates         Mammals         Oceans         Polar Regions         Rain Forest         Reptiles

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