Nature can be beautiful. Elegant. Graceful.
But not always. Believe it or not, animals don’t do everything they do to impress us. If you doubt it, look no further than the fact that some animals eat their own feces.
This phenomenon, called coprophagy, occurs throughout the animal kingdom. It is particularly well-known among rodents, rabbits and their relatives, and—less often—dogs and apes.
The participation of this last group has caused caused particular shock among human witnesses, not least because apes are supposed to be our close evolutionary relatives.
But two new studies may offer a measure of comfort. At least, such as can be found in such a dismal situation.
The studies suggest that chimps and bonobos—the two species that are our closest ape relatives—eat poop not for its own sake, but in order to retrieve hard, nutritious seeds from it.
Coprophagy may be an “adaptive feeding strategy during periods of food scarcity,” wrote Tetsuya Sakamaki of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan, in a study published in the Oct. 31 advance online issue of the journal Primates.
Sakamaki reported that he spent a total of no less than 1,142 hours (48 days) watching a group of about two dozen wild bonobos at the Luo Scientific Reserve in the Congo. Among them, “at least five females… practiced coprophagy and/or fecal inspection,” he wrote.
Samakaki found most of the episodes hard to see clearly, because they occurred high in trees, but he came away with the impression that the apes were trying to get at seeds. In the most clearly visible case, a young female “used her lips to extract Dialium seeds from the feces in her hand, ate the seeds, and discarded other fibrous parts in the feces,” he wrote.
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