For the burying beetle, life starts out in both the cradle and the grave. These two beetles will bury the body of a shrew underground before laying their eggs inside it.
", "is_us_only": "false", "title": "World's Weirdest: Raising Kids in a Corpse?", "url": "http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/animals/bugs-animals/beetles/weirdest-burying-beetle/", "country_code_deny_list": [], "allowUserEmbed": "True", "related": { "link": [ { "url": "http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/28/beetle-mania-conserving-an-endangered-insect-at-the-st-louis-zoo/", "name": "Beetle Mania: Conserving an Endangered Insect at the St. Louis Zoo" } ] }, "credit": "National Geographic", "smil": "http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/data/xml/weirdest-burying-beetle.smil", "country_code_allow_list": [], "HTML5src": "/video/player/media-mp4/weirdest-burying-beetle/mp4/variant-playlist.m3u8", "still": "http://video.nationalgeographic.com/exposure/core_media/ngphoto/image/52616_0_616x346.jpg", "transcript": "The burying beetle. \u00a0These beetles take recycling to a bizarre extreme.
For this enterprising insect a cadaver is a perfect place to raise a family.
A female arrives.
Love is in the stinky air.
Impressed with his find, she moves in...or rather, down.
The beetles will bury the body up to two feet underground.
They must hide it from vultures and the many other scavengers who fancy a shrew.
For the other scavengers, a dead shrew is just another meal.
But for the burying beetles, this cadaver is far more than a food source.\u00a0 It's their nursery.
Burying it is only the first step in a very long remodeling process.\u00a0 Their mandibles strip away the fur.\u00a0 Chemicals are secreted over the body to prevent it from spoiling...until it becomes unrecognizable from its former shrew self.
It's the beetles' equivalent of a well-stocked fridge...ready for the arrival of many hungry babies, up to 30, depending on the size of the corpse.
The parents protect them, clean them, and even feed them.\u00a0 They chew up the corpse and regurgitate it as beetle baby formula.
By the time the corpse is gone, the larvae will be ready to transform into adults.
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