Northern Tamandua (Tamandua mexicana)

Dear Readers, it’s not unheard of for animals to defecate or urinate in particular spots – rhinos and hyenas both use ‘middens’ as toilets, and these sites are thought to be both territorial markers and places where members of the same species can assess things like the health and sexual status of their neighbours. But in Costa Rica, ecologist Jeremy Quiros Navarro has discovered a site 30 metres up in the canopy of the rainforest that is used by at least 17 different  species of mammal – “It was crazy,” he says. “It is almost the total number of canopy mammals that you can find in the cloud forest.”

Margay ( a type of wild cat), howler and capuchin monkeys, porcupines, tamanduas, coatis and opossums all used the same  spot, which was in a particular species of strangler fig (Ficus tuerckheimii ). This vine wraps around a tree, gradually killing it and leaving a kind of exoskeleton. At canopy height, though, it forms a platform, described by Quiros Navarro as being ‘like an upturned hand’.

Ficus tuerckheimii at Monteverde

Since this initial discovery, other ‘public toilets’ have been discovered in Honduras and Borneo, all of them in this particular kind of strangler fig. Whether the plant gains anything from all this varied ‘fertiliser’ is anybody’s guess. At any rate, even sloths, who were previously thought to descend to the earth to defecate, seem to favour this high-rise alternative. And who wouldn’t? It’s bad enough having to get up to go to the toilet, without having to climb down 30 metres’ worth of tree.

The tree canopies of rainforests are some of the most under-studied regions on earth. Who knows what else will be discovered?

The New Scientist article is here.

The original article is here.