“Using a waste product for a scent marking signal is energetically smart,” she said. “It is costly for animals to create specialized scent secretions, but urine and dung require no extra energy costs. Dung is larger and therefore easier to find, but the longevity of dung vs. urine is species-specific.”

Plenty of other animals, both plant- and meat-eaters, use such communal pooping grounds – and identifying the telltale compounds in their dung could open a new door to studying them as well as to creating new tools for land management and species conservation.

— Courtney Marneweck of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, talking about how white rhinos communicate with each other via their dung. Read more at Scientists discover that white rhino dung has a lot in common with a Facebook post at the Los Angeles Times.