Scatology
It starts with an S and it ends with a T
It comes out of you and it comes out of me
I know what you’re thinking but don’t call it that
Let’s be scientific, and call it SCAT
The 4th grader in all of us is giggling right now.
But scat is actually a very serious subject. As youngsters, I’m sure many of us dreamed of becoming wildlife biologists and imagined visiting wild places to study bears, lions, or other large mammals in their natural habitats. Spending hours watching them forage, hunt, play, etc.
The reality is that most animals are quite elusive. Jane Goodall and a few others excluded, biologists can spend hours, days, YEARS looking for them and never see them in person. What most scientists end up doing is collecting evidence of their presence in an area. Fur caught on a scratching post or fence line. SCAT.
summer holly berries in fox scat
A lot can be learned from a pile of scat. It can show what the animal has been eating, what types of plants and other animals live in their habitat, where they have been hunting or grazing, and if they have any diseases. DNA collected from it can help determine how individual animals are related to each other as well as trace their ancestry back multiple generations.
manzanita berries in fox scat
When our educators take students on island tours, scat becomes the focus of some of our learning opportunities because of course kids like nothing better than to talk about “poop.” What we love is seeing the sudden “aha” moment when they make the connection between what they observe in the scat and then finding a bush on the trail with those same berries.
I encourage all of you to channel your inner 4th grader the next time you visit the islands and do some sleuthing of your own to see if you can make similar connections. It’s another way to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the ecosystem you are visiting.
Submitted by Andrea Mills