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Congo: Building a Garden Out of Gorilla Poop

Members of the Fossey Fund Biodiversity Research team work to identify plants in the rainforest.

They are used to grow locally prized medicinal plants and edible wild fruits, which can be distributed to community members near the Nkuba Conservation Area (NCA).

Gorilla Fund
Nov 15, 2020

Excerpt:

Not far from the village of Nkuba, in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas roam, lies a two-and-a-half acre field—just a bit bigger than a soccer field­—that holds special promise for scientists and conservationists.

The Fossey Fund created this 100-by-100-meter botanical garden near our office using gorilla dung that our trackers and researchers collected in the field. But why go to all the trouble of collecting and transporting poop?

The “poop garden” project was born as a scientific experiment to generate information and data on the germination rate of plants grown from seeds found in Grauer’s gorilla dung. Using this information, we can better understand the role of gorillas in seed dispersal and forest maintenance.

The plants grown from these seeds also provide important information on the gorillas’ diet, allowing us to identify which plants this little-known gorilla subspecies relies upon. And because we can classify gorilla dung based on its size (e.g., silverback poop is bigger than that of an adult female, which is bigger than that of a juvenile), we can also answer questions about how diet may vary according to sex and age and also by season.

But that’s just one part of our poop garden.

Read the complete article here.