This is Scientific Americans' 62nd Science. I'm Emily Schwing.

Parenting can seem a thankless gig. First, you and your partner track down a dead body.

Next, the two of you work together to bury it, and it's often many times the size of your own body.

If it starts to rot or you start to snack on this body, you'll have to cover

the stench of decomposition with your own anal secretions so that other hungry,

desperate, overworked parents don't come looking for your lunch.

And this, all before your kids, are even born.

That is, if you're a sylphid beetle.

So they're commonly called burying beetles, and in England they're called sexting beetles.

The sextons repeat what buried the dead, and that's what these beetles do.

Derek Sykes is the curator of insects and a professor of entomology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum of the North.

A study he and a colleague recently published in the Journal of Zoology explores the parental behavior of these undertaking beetles.

Yeah, so they buried dead vertebrates like a dead bird or mouse, and they'll work together as a male-female team to get it down underground.

And they try to find it when it's really fresh, sometimes within hours of death.

Before there's any noticeable smell to humans.

In his lab Sykes opens a cabinet door and slides out a drawer filled with black and orange armored beetles.

This is a world collection, so I've traveled all around the world and collected these in various parts of Asia.

They're primarily found in the northern hemisphere, and when they do occur in the southern hemisphere, it's usually on mountain tops.

Which gives us a concern for them for climate change because they're very cold-adapted.

Mountain tops and the tropics are becoming warmer and warmer.

They're going to have to move up slope and they may eventually lose habitat entirely.

Some of them are very big.

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