White Rhino’s Use Poo As Social Network

From the water cooler to Facebook, people have always come together to share information. Apparently white rhino’s do the same thing. The only difference is they meet at a giant pile of poo. White rhino’s faeces contains chemical cues that deliver information about gender, age, health and reproductive status to other rhinos that visit a the communal latrine whose scientific name is a midden.

Dung contains information

Courtney Marnewec who is studying ecology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and is leading the study says that people tend to think of dung as simply waste, however it is a really great way for animals to communicate and there is a lot information it conveys that we simply don’t use. Lots of animals make use of chemical in urine and faeces to find out what is happening with other members of their species. This is the reason for example why dogs like to sniff fire hydrants. What makes the white rhino unique is they defecate as a group in the same location

Looked at 200 rhinos

Marneweck and her team followed over 200 individual white rhinos in South Africa from different populations and sampled their poo after the rhinos payed a visit to their middens. This enabled the team to keep tabs on exactly what individual rhinos were contributing to the sample. It was relatively easy to find the middens because the large animals trample grass along paths that are well used and do not travel far when it comes time to add to the collection.

They don’t smell as bad as you would expect

Middens are also very hard to miss because measure as much as 65 feet across. Surprisingly the researchers say the middens do not smell that bad. Once they located a midden, the scientists analysed rhino dung’s chemical makeup. What they would find is that different ages, sexes had faeces carry different cues. The researchers then created fake poo from grass and mud, and then spritzed it with the same compounds that were obtained from three different groups. The fake dung was deposited randomly in selected middens and then they watched how the dominant males responded to it.

Males were the most responisve

What they found was interesting, males were extremely responsive to fake dung that was spritzed with chemicals from females ready to mate. The males spent more time sniffing it than other rhinos did. They also made more visits to the midden and defecated on the experimental poo according to the study. Their reaction clearly shows that male rhinos were receiving information from chemicals Ms Marneweck says.