South Africa's rhinos literally talk s**t

Forget Twitter and Facebook. Rhinos have developed their own social network to communicate with each other and get their latest gossip - through massive mounds of poo.

Zoology expert Courtney Marneweck‚who this week graduated with a PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal‚ conducted an innovative study into how rhinos use their dung to communicate and suss each other out. Marneweck’s study revealed that rhino dung contains clues for others to sniff out about age‚ sex‚ if a female is ready to mate and whether a male has a territory or not. Rhinos are known to make consistent use of common areas‚ known as middens‚ leaving behind information for other rhinos to sniff out.

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This is the first study confirming olfactory - sense of smell - communication in the embattled species and involved the tracking of 200 rhino.

“It is like a social networking site‚ to put it simply. Rhinos can deposit their status and information and other rhinos go there to read these messages.

“It is really amazing the wealth information they can extract from the dung. They can tell the age‚ the sex‚ the territory and they can also tell how long ago the rhino was there‚" she said.

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This is determined from the chemical composition of the droppings.

Marneweck also planted fake droppings in the research area “mimicking the chemical clues in the original to assess the responses of rhinos to the planted messages”.

“My research shows the potential to manipulate behaviour using odours. This could be applied to increasing the success of captive breeding‚ increasing the success of translocations and potentially keeping animals away from areas of high conflict‚” she explained.

- TMG Digital/TimesLIVE