Oh Poop!

There are certain things that happen that remind me that science might be my correct path.  In the pressure of writing grants, collecting data, entering data, working on publications, ect, sometimes the day to day (or should I say the data to data) of it makes me forget the reason why I became a scientist in the first place.  For me this week, it was poop that reminded me.  For those of you who know me from a certain period of my life this statement shouldn’t surprise you.  You were there when I was crowned poop queen many months in a row. For the rest of you, yes there actually is something called poop queen and yes I have been it, and yes poop reminded me why I recently repacked up all my possessions to go live in a tent in the middle of a tropical forest. 

So to explain why I found poop so exciting, I need to take a step back.  Recently, I have been on this path to try to figure out why proboscis monkeys sleep in certain trees and not others.  It has been in the back of my mind since I started studying proboscis monkeys, but I began formally collecting data on sleep tree selection, when sleep time was the only time I actually saw the monkeys.  Initially, this sleep tree project was supposed to be a little side project.  It was going to be a finite set of data that was fairly easy to collect with fairly simple data analysis so I could write it up quickly or present it at conferences (the dataset for my actually dissertation seems anything but simple-if anyone knows how to deal with both temporal and spatially auto correlated data- send me a message); however, recently my sleep site project has been taking over (maybe there is a correlation between how much Katie is not sleeping, and how much she is thinking of primates sleeping).  Most of the literature to date state that most primates select sleep sites as a way reduce predation risk.  This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption- primates have lots of natural predators (raptors, snakes, wild cats, to name a few), and if one is going to have to turn one’s back to predators (or in other words- close its eyes and catch some zzzs), it is going to want to have some way of reducing the fact that it is sleeping prey.  The problem with this idea is that no matter what the data shows- people just wave their hands and say, “Oh it must be antipredator behavior”.  It could be, and I am not saying it is not, but as good scientists we should be testing these ideas and leaving the hand waving to the magicians of the world.  So to make an already long story about poop – a little shorter- I plan to to set up a couple of little experiments to test some alternative hypotheses of why proboscis monkeys sleep in certain trees (for those of you that are interested- some other ideas are thermoregulation, anti-disease vectors, social interactions, or optimal foraging).

To do some of these little experiments, I needed some proboscis monkey poop.  Sure it sounds like an easy thing to do, just get some poop, but with the fallen logs, dense vegetation, and quick sand mud, I am having a hard time following the monkeys in the forest.  If one is sitting on a boat and sees a monkey poop, it is a bit hard to then find said poop on the leaf covered forest floor (it is so much easier when you are under the monkeys and they just poop on your head).  So you all can imagine my surprise and excitement when I went to my favorite spot along the river to bath, and realize that my bathing site is covered in proboscis monkey poop.  Half clothed wet Katie is jumping up and down in the forest because she found poop.   I spent the rest of my time bathing figuring out what I wanted to do with this poop.  My assistants thought I was a little crazy when still dripping wet, tangled hair probably accented with leaves (I was too excited to comb my hair or properly dry off), I go directly to my tent and grab my latex gloves and a zip lock bag; turn around going back into the forest proclaiming, “Saya temuka kotoran bekantan! (I found proboscis monkey poop).”

In the end, my little experiment didn’t discover anything interesting; however, finding a pile of monkey poop did allow me to rediscover my exciting and joy of science.