The Importance of Elephant Scat
by Trip Jennings
Expedition Granted Competitor

This week I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Sammuel Wasser, the mastermind behind my expedition. I headed up to Seattle where his lab takes up the better part of a floor in a University of Washington science building.

Wasser, Conservation Biology department director at the university, is a pioneering biologist who has literally changed the face of his field. He's developed techniques for non-invasive research on animals from elephants to spotted owls and most surprisingly, killer whales. Non-invasive means that instead of shooting animals with tranquilizers and using radio collars or taking skin samples for DNA, he's able to study these animals just by sifting through their poop.

In 2004 Wasser fundamentally changed the way wildlife forensics works for the international policing agency INTERPOL. By analyzing DNA from the largest seizure of poached ivory since the 1989 ban and then comparing it to his DNA map of African elephant populations, he made quite a discovery. Instead of cherry picking many different African elephant herds, Wasser found that ivory poachers were actually consistently hammering the same populations time and time again, pushing them dangerously close to the brink.

Where does the poop come in? The data for his DNA map comes largely from collecting scat samples of elephants all over Africa. This discovery, enabled by poop, underscores the urgency of completing this DNA map of all elephant populations in Africa and thus the urgency of our project.

While touring Wasser's lab he repeated the importance of our expedition to his work and to preventing forest elephant herds in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to be pushed any closer to the edge of extinction. Elephants there are not as lucky as other populations and sadly have fewer advocates. Because of the dense tree cover, aerial surveys are inaccurate and Wasser has little DNA data from the Congo. It would seem that the same threat to elephants in the area - easy access to big guns - has also intimidated many of the would-be poop scooping researchers.

Not to say that we're fearless, but my team's experience in the country during our Congo River Expedition in 2008 instilled a passion for the region's vast and, in many cases, intact wilderness and the people that inhabit it. To imagine one of the largest wilderness areas remaining in the world without their iconic species, the forest elephant, is difficult at best. The possibility that these amazing animals could disappear in our lifetime is ample motivation to put in the hours - and months - it will take to get in and out safely, with a backpack full of feces.