Picking Up Poop for Science | National Geographic

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We call it Black Gold, really because you can learn so much information from an individual animal just based on its poop sample. My keepers are collecting the feces on a regular basis, two to three times a week. We can then put that poop in a coffee cup, we send it to the hospital, and then within a week to two weeks, they can do an analysis looking at different hormones. We can actually determine when a female is pregnant.

So these aren't immediate health questions, typically they're more things like: Is my female having normal reproductive cycles? Is she capable of getting pregnant and producing an offspring? Twenty plus years ago, the only way that we could look at these kinds of hormone levels was to collect urine or blood, which can be invasive. This means that you may have to immobilize an animal and do a procedure that has some risk.

You know, depending on what the animals eat, the poop samples smell better or worse. Herbivore samples tend to smell grassy, like what the animals are eating. Carnivore samples tend to smell not so good; big cat samples tend to probably smell some of the worst. But we also deal with samples when they're frozen, which really cuts back on the smell. We don't work with them when they're warm, so, you know, something you get used to, but it's really not as bad as people might think.

We have some animals that live a solitary lifestyle, and we have some animals that live in a social group. So in our setting here at the zoo, if we need to collect the feces from an individual, it's very difficult for us to differentiate the different feces that we'll find in the yard. So we have to have ways to be able to identify which animal produced which pile of feces.

The way we do that is through a very simple technique: we can either use colored beads that we put into the diet or glitter. It's not harmful to the animals, and then as it passes through, we would expect to see that different colored glitter, and we can identify exactly which animal received that diet.

The ultimate goal is to have the population be self-sustaining, so being able to reproduce individuals when they need to reproduce and have a population in zoos that continues to thrive and is healthy.

This frog now, you might be disgusted at me doing this, but it has a very noxious skin secretion.