Dung beetles remove waste, sequester carbon, increase nitrogen and water retention, and reduce pest fly populations. In the North American Great Plains, dung beetle communities have undergone a massive restructuring due to changes in mammal communities. Specially, the extirpation of widely distributed bison herds and introduction of their functional replacement, cattle, likely have affected dung beetle populations, but these changes have rarely been investigated. Bison differ from cattle in their grazing patterns, how they are managed, and their dung quality. To test for differences in dung beetle communities we sampled dung beetles in Kansas in 2018 and Montana in 2022, both across bison- and cattle- grazed grasslands. In total, 225,268 dung beetles from 17 species were recorded in Kansas and 13,915 dung beetles from 17 species were recorded in Montana. Across both sites, neither dung beetle abundance nor species richness greatly differed between bison- and cattle-grazed sites. However, dung beetle community composition did differ between bison- and cattle-grazed sites in both Kansas and Montana. In Montana, the cattle community was dominated by non-native species compared to the bison community. In Kansas, only one non-native species was present (shared by both cattle and bison), and the bison community was tightly constrained compared to a variable cattle community. Future work will seek to unravel the mechanistic underpinnings driving differences between dung beetle communities in grasslands grazed by these megaherbivores with management implications for maintaining productive dung beetles and their ecosystem services.
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