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| Elephant dung, surprisingly, has medicinal purposes! |
Did you know:
Elephant dung
serves multiple purposes for humans: when burned in a fire, the fumes are a
fantastic natural mosquito repellant; you can cook it down in liquid and drink
it should you be suffering from a severe cold and flu; and if you set the dung
on fire and sniff the smoke it will cure a bloody nose?
We learned
this, and many more facts about wildlife behavior, and their feces.
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| Our Nature expert and the Military Official, with a machine gun |
On our last day
in Zambia, we participated in a game tour and rhino walk. We had heard that a “must do” while in
Livingstone was to walk with the rhinos.
A brief lesson in current affairs: rhinos are being ruthlessly hunted in
Africa for their horns. And so,
many national parks in the continent are taking action and gating up their
parks so to preserve this species from becoming extinct. And so as a result of their dwindling
numbers, rhinos aren’t often spotted in the wildlife. So this was a perfect way to see a few while in the area, as
we were led by a nature expert and a military officer (who carried a machine
gun no less) through the park.
So anyway, as
there are no guarantees on what wildlife we will see (except for the rhinos as
the personnel usually have a pretty good idea on where they migrate), the
nature expert took it upon himself to show us a few pieces of evidence of
wildlife behavior. As with most sciences,
a lot is learned from studying animal dung. And so…
-Elephant
poachers look for female dung that also indicates if they are in heat (ie blood
in the stool) and will rub it all over them to attract the attention of male
elephants so they can capture them.
-Young zebras
will eat their mother’s feces to build up enough bacteria in their system that
they do not develop during pregnancy.
-Rhinos, like
dogs, will do the “whole gamut” of their bathroom business in one setting so as
to “mark their territory”, while elephants typically spread it out over the
course of a few hundred feet.
But we learned a few other facts of wildlife that weren’t necessarily dung-related as well. Those are:
-There is a
species of ants called Lion Ants.
They dig their hole in the dirt so that it looks conical with a hole in
the middle. When other insects
come to investigate the hole, bits of sand alert the ant below that something
is disturbing their habitat, and so they shoot bits of sand out to stun the
insect and thus drop it into the hole, where the ant will never actually eat the insect, but rather will simply suck
out the fluid.
-Another ant,
living in Africa and are as big as half of my pinkie finger, will take termite
eggs from the nest, and when the termites are born they become the ants’ slaves
for life.
-There is a
particular type of tree (a Mopane tree) that, when elephants start to eat the
bark, they form a chemical up through the bark that will makes the flavor of
the tree taste bad for the elephant.
And it doesn’t end there; all of these trees are connected through the
roots and will communicate to
the other Mopane trees in the area to guard themselves so elephants will not
eat them.
(Incidentally,
the Mopane tree also has a caterpillar that lives on the tree that is a
delicacy in Africa. But that’s for
another blog.)
-Elephants go
through approximately 7 sets of teeth throughout their whole life. If you look at trees and their branches
and bark, you can (or at least, an elephant expert can) decipher an estimate of
the elephant’s age by seeing how ragged the branches are. A young elephant will thrash through
the bark and branches with abandon, while the older (and much wiser) elephant,
who has gone through 5 or 6 sets of teeth, will eat the bark more gingerly and
therefore leave less of a trace of his presence. Once the elephant loses its last set of teeth, it will
eventually starve and die. In the
wild, elephants usually have a lifespan of 60 years or so. In a zoo, where they are fed softer
foods, can live up to 75!
So there you
go. Today’s trivia for you to
impress your friends. And don’t
forget, the next time the winter’s flu takes a nasty hold of you, head to your
nearest pharmacist and ask for the elephant dung…I’m sure they have some in stock.
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