Does Animal Poo Hold the Key to Animal Conservation? The Poo Zoo Thinks So

The post Does Animal Poo Hold the Key to Animal Conservation? The Poo Zoo Thinks So appeared first on A-Z Animals.

Would you dig through animal excrement if you knew you would find a diamond? Wildlife researchers at the University of Oxford, Revive & Restore, and Chester Zoo are collecting feces from animals for a reason even more valuable: to prevent endangered animals from going extinct!

With 1 million animals on the path toward extinction, it’s more critical than ever to find ways to stop this trend and protect our precious wildlife. That’s why Professor Suzannah Williams and her team have been working on an innovative, non-invasive technique to collect live animal cells — through their poop. The project, aptly named, the Poo Zoo, could make huge waves in the field of wildlife conservation.

What Is the Poo Zoo?

“For the first time, we are searching for a non-invasive way to collect and save living cells from multiple species, preventing the loss of genetic diversity and therefore helping with conservation,” Professor Williams, who leads this team and other research projects at Oxford University, says.

It’s not just bagging up dung and saving it in a lab. The Poo Zoo works by freezing living cells to be used in the future, and it just so happens that researchers are able to obtain these valuable cells through the animal’s excrement.

“One key factor in insuring against the loss of any endangered species is to save their genetic diversity,” Professor Williams explains. “And we can do this by storing it frozen in cells that are alive. We can then use these cells in various ways to help with conservation.”

It’s Designed to Protect Endangered Animals

It sounds like a no-brainer, right? Just collect samples from every endangered species to store for later and protect these creatures from extinction. Yet, according to Professor Williams, it’s harder than you might think. “Getting cells from endangered animals often requires obtaining skin samples either quickly after death or by invasive biopsies, the latter of which is difficult for endangered species, especially in the wild where the individuals will need to be handled,” she says.

Because of this, scientists don’t have as many stored samples as they could. “Limited genetic diversity is currently being saved,” Professor Williams says. To increase this number, the researchers at Oxford have found a way to collect samples from poop that won’t hurt the animals and will increase the number of samples researchers have. “We need a non-invasive alternative to collect living cells to increase the genetic diversity that is being saved,” she says. “It is well known that intestinal cells are sloughed off daily into feces. Poo Zoo aims to harness these living intestinal cells to prevent extinction, providing a non-invasive source of viable cells for conservation.”

Once the researchers have obtained these living cells through this groundbreaking method, they can cryogenically store them to preserve the sample.

What Animals Are the Poo Zoo Working With?  

Right now, researchers at Oxford and the Chester Zoo are focused on the Asian elephant and Rothschild’s giraffe, although Professor Williams says more endangered species are planned.

Asian elephants are the largest land animal in Asia, with a unique finger-like muscle at the end of their long trunks that can help them pick up objects. These majestic animals are wanted by poachers for their tusks and skin. There are less than 50,000 left of these endangered animals, who prefer to live in grassland, forests, and scrubland.

Rothschild’s giraffe is a subspecies of the Northern giraffe and is another endangered animal. This is the world’s tallest subspecies of giraffe, which can grow up to six meters tall. There is estimated to be less than 2,500 Rothschild’s giraffes left, found only in small populations in western Kenya and northern Uganda, per Tusk.org.

The Poo Zoo’s Goal

As technologies develop and the research continues, the main goal of the Poo Zoo is to develop protocols to collect viable intestinal cells from various species. Eventually, they want to reprogram these cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.

Professor Williams shares her goal for the Poo Zoo: “To have easy-to-follow sample collection and processing protocols to enable widespread and quick collection of non-invasively collected cells,” she says. “These cells will be stored frozen in a biobank for future use in conservation of endangered species.”

Although the project is in the early stages now, Professor Williams hopes to roll their finished protocols to other zoos in the future so even more endangered animals can be protected.

What Does the Future Hold?

One day, the team hopes to use these extracted cells to boost genetic diversity in the endangered species, cloning the animal, and reprogramming the cells into sperm and eggs to eventually produce offspring.

Ashlee Hutchinson, program manager of Revive & Restore, told The Guardian, “If you use eggs and sperm, you get to leverage sexual reproduction and all of the recombination that happens during those events, and you get to really start to build the potential for adaptation to environmental stress.”

The Poo Zoo is just one of many ways that technology is helping us to protect the earth’s most vulnerable creatures. Biobanking, like the Poo Zoo or the Frozen Zoo in San Diego, can help preserve the tissues of the animals for use now and for future ways we can’t even fathom yet.

That’s pretty special poop!

The post Does Animal Poo Hold the Key to Animal Conservation? The Poo Zoo Thinks So appeared first on A-Z Animals.