Meet The 'Poo Zoo' Team Battling Animal Extinction One Dung At A Time
Last year, Professor Suzannah Williams began a project with a noble aim and a hilarious title: the Poo Zoo.
The scheme, created with funding from conservation non-profit Revive and Restore, has partnered with Chester Zoo to optimise the care and protection we can offer the million-plus species at risk of extinction.
More specifically, the experts want to help at-risk animals by using their dung.
Dr Rhiannon Bolton, who’s researching the droppings of animals in the care of Chester Zoo, is at the forefront of the “game-changing” program.
But how could excreta save the endangered?
Dung samples have special legal and physical advantages
Dr Bolton shared that current UK veterinary guidelines mean you can only collect genetic samples in very limited circumstances, which limits the samples that can be collected.
But since Oxford University researchers, working with the Poo Zoo project, started trialling new ways to isolate, wash, and culture living animals cells to store them for conservation purposes, a whole new world of sampling has opened up.
“It’s early days yet, but this would allow us to collect cells from a far broader range of animals than we currently can, both individuals within a species and in terms of different species,” she said.
The Chester Zoo team are currently collecting samples from giraffe, okapi, and lions. The cells, if successfully extracted, could eventually become stem cells, which in turn can become egg and sperm cells used for conservation breeding.
Dr Sue Walker, head of science at Chester Zoo, told HuffPost UK: “We know living cells are shed every time a bird, mammal, reptile and amphibian evacuates faecal matter.
“They come from the gut walls and are carried out with the waste. The process involves sifting the waste to isolate and capture those cells.”
In the case of the Poo Zoo, she continued: “The goal is to bank [washed cells] so they can be used to prevent extinctions.”
That’s not the only dung-based scheme the zoo runs
Chester Zoo’s staff are used to dealing with dung; they have had an endocrinology programme where faecal samples are used to track animal health over the years.