Upon his arrival to Australia from Hungary in 1951, Dr Bornemissza, an entomologist and ecologist, noted that Australian farmland was covered in a large number of cattle dung pads.
Native Australian species of beetle had co-evolved alongside marsupials such as the kangaroo and wombat, which produce small, hard, dry and fibrous pellets of dung.
[2] Once introduced, dung beetles in Australia were studied in order to determine their effects on: Care had to be taken to introduce only those species that would be most compatible with the Australian climates and soil types, that were not under great threat of predation or of themselves becoming pests, and that effectively dispersed dung pads within an ideal time frame of 48 hours so as to minimise successful fly and worm breeding by disrupting their reproductive cycles.
Here, dung beetles, particularly the species Onthophagus gazella, had already been successfully introduced from Africa in order to help biologically control the numbers of horn fly.
These eggs successfully developed into adult beetles and were among those in the first batches released into the wild on 30 January 1968 in Lansdown, near Townsville, Queensland.
This quarantine method was subsequently adopted at the CSIRO research base in Pretoria, South Africa, with the added step of the eggs being transported by air in sealed containers of sterile peat moss.
To this end, a further research unit was set up in Montpellier, France, as a base from which to study European species that may be more suited for introduction to cooler, southern areas of Australia.
Firstly, researchers took stocktaking trips to locations around South Africa in order to collect data on the biodiversity and ecological abundance of the beetle fauna of an area, as well as the environmental conditions preferred by different species.
[3] It was necessary to devise and record methods of propagating dung beetles in large numbers, and this information forwarded onto the research base in Australia.
Adult beetles were then bred in insectaries for two or more generations in sterile conditions to eliminate the possibility of co-breeding parasitic mites or diseases endemic to Africa such as foot-and-mouth.
[1] Some beetle species were rejected at this stage and not subsequently released onto pastureland because difficulty was experienced in rearing those that entered a period of dormancy and some simply did not survive the stringent quarantining procedures.
[13] They were packed into ventilated crates of damp peat and thousands at a time were simply tipped onto fresh dung pads at the chosen release sites.
[1][15] In 1998, interest in the project was revived when John Feehan, the manager of Soilcam, was invited by the Taroom Shire Landcare Group to give a seminar on the use of dung beetles.
This project was entitled "Improving Sustainable Land Management Systems in Queensland using Dung Beetles" and lasted for two years from January 2001 until December 2002.
The project has been tasked with the key objective of expanding the range of dung beetles in Australia and analysing their performance for livestock producers.
[18] § modified from a table in Edwards (2007)[14] with some additional information from Edwards, et al. (2007)[5] and African Dung Beetles Online[19] † ACT = Australian Capital Territory, NSW = New South Wales, NT = Northern Territories, QLD = Queensland, SA = South Australia, Tas = Tasmania, Vic = Victoria, WA = Western Australia.