Welcome to the Scarab group website.

Having shown an interest in our website, I suppose you will not be too perturbed by someone who has spent some 30 years looking at insects running around in the dung of various African animals. The interest dates from the time I joined the Pretoria station of the Australian CSIRO Dung Beetle Research Unit (DBRU) after traveling overland from the U.K. through 13 African countries to South Africa. Fifteen years at the DBRU from 1971-1986 saw me traveling to further African countries whilst curating the DBRU reference collection and accumulating taxonomic background which I have subsequently put to good use in community ecology and biogeographical studies. Following the closure of the DBRU, moves to the Zoology departments at the University of Cape Town (1987-1996) and the University of Pretoria (1996-present) have broadened my background and added eco-physiological studies to my list of experience. If you are at all interested in scarab dung beetles and the various other groups of predatory and coprophagous beetles found in dung, it is worthwhile browsing through the publications and activities listed on our website. African countries which I have visited, or in which I have collected dung beetles: Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo (Kinshasa), Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

My e-mail address is adavis@zoology.up.ac.za