Post by ♥ COVID-19♥ on Sept 28, 2010 14:01:08 GMT -6
Not that you needed ANY new reasons to add to your monkey poo collection ... but this one is almost noble ... dignified, even ...
My colleagues and I are currently studying gelada reproductive strategies, hormones and genetics. We can best be described as hunter-gatherers, using every part of our prey. But there’s a difference: We hunt poop. I guess you could call us professional pooper-scoopers.
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One can obtain all sorts of information from poop. What have your research subjects been eating? Do they have any parasites? How stressed are they? Is this female cycling, lactating or pregnant? Does that male have high or low testosterone? Who is this baby’s father? Are those two females related? To answer each of these questions requires a different part of the sample — and we use the entire sample.
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Collecting poop is our way of doing invasive research without being invasive. We cannot just collect any sample we see. We need to place the piece of poop into context. For both genetics and hormones we need to know the individual who “gave” us the sample. For the hormonal research we need to know what time of day the sample was collected, what the male or female’s social status was, what the male or female’s reproductive state was, and on what day of the month the sample was collected. So as much fun as it is to say “pooper-scooper,” there is a lot more science to what we do.
...
One can obtain all sorts of information from poop. What have your research subjects been eating? Do they have any parasites? How stressed are they? Is this female cycling, lactating or pregnant? Does that male have high or low testosterone? Who is this baby’s father? Are those two females related? To answer each of these questions requires a different part of the sample — and we use the entire sample.
...
Collecting poop is our way of doing invasive research without being invasive. We cannot just collect any sample we see. We need to place the piece of poop into context. For both genetics and hormones we need to know the individual who “gave” us the sample. For the hormonal research we need to know what time of day the sample was collected, what the male or female’s social status was, what the male or female’s reproductive state was, and on what day of the month the sample was collected. So as much fun as it is to say “pooper-scooper,” there is a lot more science to what we do.
