THE INCREASING SCIENTIFIC INTEREST in dung beetles was fuelled by both the burgeoning scientific industry (with biology diversifying into a multitude of new fields, from invasion biology to genetic engineering) and by the usefulness of dung beetles in our explorations of these new fields. Two characteristics of dung beetles have made them stars of the new biology: first, there are lots of them – over 6 000 species, offering a huge variety of already named species on which to test new ideas; secondly, they are incredibly compliant. Dung beetles, whether in captivity or the wild, get on with their lives regardless of who is watching or manipulating their small world. This makes them perfect subjects for studies of animal behaviour, in which we can ask questions of a simple animal and get straightforward answers, which in turn inform our understanding of how other organisms (including ourselves) perceive the world.

Why do animals move? For what purpose? The world is full of animals with which we share common spaces. Most of those animals move, apparently with reason or purpose, leading us to wonder what they are up to. These questions are at the core of the study of animal behaviour which, despite being an ancient human activity, is considered to be a relatively young science. Nevertheless, being formalised as a science under the rubric of ‘ethology’ by French biologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805–1861) gave credibility to the careful observation of nature often provided by enthusiastic collectors. Darwin treated behaviour (along with structure) as a characteristic subject to natural selection, which could therefore influence an organism's chance of survival and reproduction. Unfortunately, Saint-Hilaire chose a word deriving from ‘ethos’ (from the Greek for ‘moral character’) and with a history of other meanings. Seventeenth century actors who portrayed human characters on stage were known as ethologists, while John Stuart Mill used the word ethologists to describe those who studied ethics. The name ethology has nevertheless stuck, and is used to describe the study of the behaviour of animals in their natural habitat.

Fabre (despite his rejection of a Darwinian interpretation of why the natural world looked the way it did) made important contributions to the infant science of ethology through his detailed observations of the behaviour of dung beetles and other insects, including bees and wasps.