• Question: why can poo be good for science?

    Asked by jrudrum to Cassie on 13 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Cassandra Raby

      Cassandra Raby answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Poo is great for science! It’s just a shame it is so smelly 😉

      We can find out so much information about an animal so easily by using its poo… it’s the only sample of themselves that animals leave behide. Think about when you go to the doctors and they want to find out why you are ill. They might prod you, take your temperature, and maybe take some blood samples… because they can find out a lot about you from that.

      Now imagine trying to prod a baboon.
      Trust me… that would not go very well… baboons get grumpy very easily!
      Now imagine trying to get a blood sample… I think that would go even worse!

      And the same applies to many other wild animals. They don’t really like people trying to catch them for samples. We can do that but there are reasons why we don’t do it too often.. animals get stressed, it’s expensive, the animals might die. Is that a good thing to do?

      So what can poo actually tell us?
      Well I find out how ill the baboons are.
      I can also find chemicals that tell me how unhappy a baboon is.
      We can find the animals DNA – which can tell us a lot about it.

      And there are probably more things we can do! But these are what I look at and are what most scientists use poo samples for.

Comments

  • Photo: Sofia

    Sofia commented on :

    We do the same with the poo from fish! And you can imagine how tricky that is 🙂 but it can help you know what the animals eat in nature and this is very useful for us to know what to feed them when they are in our aquariums! This is really important since fish are really fast and you cannot chase them around to know what they are eating (or ask them that!), you can only look at what they have in the stomach or what they poo…so we end up collecting the poo many times!