Crappy science-- literally!

My apologies for using the word; I do not intend to cuss. But please read on, for there is a lot we can learn from sh*t.

Alright, let’s be a bit more scientific. We’ve been collecting leopard cat scats (poop, sh*t, crap… call it what you want) for the last 10 months we’ve been here on field. So far, we have 50-something scats stored in 95% ethanol in little plastic bottles (plastic vials with stopper are rare and expensive here). I wasn’t intending to study diet at all, but given our failure to trap leopard cats, might as well use them in my thesis.

So about a couple of weeks ago, I started doing my analysis on our samples. I tell you, after this, I will always associate the smell of ethanol with leopard cat scat! It’s quite a strong smell, but once you get over the odor, you get into the groove of scatology (i.e. the study of poop).

Ella Fitzgerald, Bach, Kimya Dawson, Carlos Vives, Parokya ni Edgar, The Corrs, John Prine, Greenday, and everything else in between keeps me company during my literally shitty moments. My ‘laboratory’ consists of a 1.7 mm sieve on a makeshift bamboo frame, a couple of pointy barbecue sticks, a pair of forceps, hot water in a plastic pail with a plastic tabo (dipper), a piece of cardboard I ripped off a box which I use to sit on, and a magnifying glass, which is perhaps the most sophisticated piece of equipment in the list. I would hunch over my sieve, wearing a mask over my face (no, it doesn’t help with the smell) and a pair of surgical gloves, picking through the soil, hair, bones, and everything else that makes up a leopard cat scat. I would take the tiny bone fragments, wash them carefully, and store them in small brown paper bags, properly labeled. I will be bringing these specimens with me back to the US, where I will seek the help of the experts from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to identify whether these fragments came from a bird, a mammal, a reptile or an amphibian (leopard cats are obligate carnivores, i.e. they eat only meat).

Diet is not the only thing one can learn from poop. Hormones can be extracted from them as well, and it can tell us about stress levels, or on what reproductive stage a female animal is. Parasite ova (eggs) can also be gleaned from scats. One can also determine how healthy an animal is from its excreta. And, DNA can also be extracted from scats. Depending on DNA quality, we can now be able to ID who owns it; how many individuals there are in our samples; what species of plants or animals the owner of the scat ate, and a few more possibilities (NB: Apologies to my colleagues for making this sound a bit more simple than it is!)

Pre-scat days, biologists used to capture animals, and gut them to obtain the stomach to study diet; they used to draw blood to determine the levels of stress hormones (which, duh, complicates the matter seeing as it stresses an animal during handing and capture!) With the advancement of science of shit, we can study a lot about the physiology, health, and ecology of an animal non-invasively (i.e. without having to capture, handle or sacrifice an animal).

Now that is Crappy Science!!!