While in college at Princeton University, I was lucky to spend time in Kenya for summer research and study abroad opportunities. In my research, I studied gut parasites that infect Grevy’s zebras – an endangered species – and plains zebras. Many dog or cat or horse owners know that they have to go to the vet periodically to de-worm their pets.
Those wormy parasites that sometimes infect our pets and call for a trip to the vet are also present in wildlife. Almost every zebra I ever encountered was infected with strongyle nematodes. These are little worms just a handful of millimeters long that live in zebras’ guts. Sometimes, they can make zebras pretty sick.
When I told people that I was studying the health of zebras in Kenya, I often was asked if I got to capture zebras and then handle the animals to draw their blood or directly take other samples from their bodies. I always answered that I am not a veterinarian and I never touched a zebra. Rather, to do my research on parasitic infection in zebras’ guts, I collected their fresh dung.
This meant that every day of my research, I went on safari around the savanna in search of zebras. When I found some, I watched and waited for them to produce some fresh dung. When a zebra dropped dung, I would collect it in a plastic sandwich bag, put it in a cooler, and study it in the lab later that day.
It may not sound too glamorous to collect dung from wildlife and then spend hours in a lab mixing it with other things or putting it through machines for analysis. It certainly doesn’t always smell good to work with dung. However, studying dung samples is a great way to do wildlife research. It’s very popular today because it is non-invasive to the animals and provides so much information to researchers.
A non-invasive research method is one where the animal does not have to be touched or bothered at all to be studied. This research is done just through observation or collection of samples that animals leave in the environment. For example, dung or tufts of fur left behind might have a bit of the animal’s DNA in it. Although it sounds cool to get to handle wildlife, I think it’s best if we can study them from a distance and not disrupt them.
Image by Lindsay Martinez
Dung samples collected off the ground where an animal just walked can provide a wealth of information. In my own project, I measured the number of gut parasite eggs and adult parasites in dung. I also studied parasite-fighting antibodies found in the dung. Meanwhile, I saw other researchers doing a variety of projects that used zebra dung.
Bits of plant DNA found in dung were analyzed to show exactly what vegetation a zebra was munching on lately. An individual zebra’s DNA is also in the dung, so researchers were studying zebra genetics just by picking up dung. Finally, some researchers extracted chemical hormones from zebra dung to study the individual’s stress.
If you want to study wildlife, dung research may just be your future. It’s a way to spend time observing wildlife and then learning so much from any samples they may produce. I may have never touched a zebra. However, I did spend many amazing and memorable hours watching zebras and waiting for those precious dung samples.
