Here’s that great story about Rock Hyrax urine as climate proxy you’ve always wanted to read.
From the University of Leicester news: Ancient urinary deposits provide a unique insight into Africa’s prehistoric climate change.
image: Wikipedia
The Rock Hyrax is a remarkable animal. Native to dry, rocky environments throughout Africa, you would be forgiven for assuming that it is a large rodent, with its short legs, short neck, rounded ears and overall resemblance to a particularly large guinea pig or a coypu minus a tail.
And yet, in defiance of expectations, the creature’s nearest living relatives are elephants and manatees. This in itself should be enough to make any research involving Rock Hyraxes worth reading.
But these furry fellows have a distinctive behaviour which, by good fortune, enables climatologists to study the environmental history of rocky areas where traditional techniques – such as taking a core – are not viable. Rock Hyraxes, it seems, are very particular about where they urinate and defecate. They like specific locations underneath rocky overhangs and generation after generation of Hyraxes will use that same spot – called a midden – over and over again. For literally thousands of years.
Some of these middens can date back 30,000 years or more. That’s the Stone Age. That’s actually the Upper Palaeolithic period!
The urine crystallises and what you end up with is a block of solid, stratified material which provides the sort of historical record that is otherwise impossible to find in these dry, rocky parts of the world. Within the midden is a record of Hyrax metabolytes as well as particles which have passed undigested through their systems (and the occasional bit of organic material that just happened to get blown there). These can be accurately dated, giving an indication of how the vegetation – and hence the climate – has changed over the millenia. And that’s what some researchers in our Department of Geography are looking into.
Just to be completely unambiguous about this:
Geographers at the University of Leicester are studying the prehistoric climate of southern Africa by examining lumps of thousand-year-old crystallised wee from something that looks like a rat but is actually more closely related to the dugong.
How brilliant is that?
Dr Andrew Carr and Dr Arnoud Boom from Leicester are part of an international team led by Dr Brian Chase from the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier. Funding for the research has been provided by the Leverhulme Trust and the European Research Council and papers on the topic have so far been published in Quaternary Research, in Geology and in the snappily named journal Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology.
Hyrax middens were first used by a South African palynologist named Louis Scott who naturally concentrated on their pollen content. The current team are the first scientists to study this extraordinary resource on a molecular level, examining animal metabolytes and plant biomarkers. Equipment at Leicester is being used to measure the bulk nitrogen and carbon isotope contents, and to identify individual plant and animal biomarkers. Colleagues in Belfast are able to accurately peg the age of a given sample using radiocarbon-dating techniques.
Hyraxes are common creatures; indeed in some areas they are considered pests. Their middens are however pretty smelly, and these ancient urinary deposits can be tricky to reach. Fortunately, Dr Chase is an experienced rock climber – that’s him in the picture equipped with angle-grinder and gas mask (cutting this stuff kicks up a lot of dust that you really don’t want to breathe in). Initially samples were knocked off with a hammer and chisel but once it was realised that cut and polished middens were finely laminated, more care was taken to extract neat samples using a micro-drill.
Paleaoenvironmental knowledge of southern Africa, which encompasses countries such as Botswana and Namibia, has always been very fragmentary and largely reliant on ocean core records. The data from the Hyrax middens open up a whole new realm of research into how some of these dynamic environments have changed over 30,000 years or so. The next step is to compare this data with established models of climate change.
Rock Hyraxes have always been interesting to anyone with a fascination for zoology, not least because of their elephantine link which is a staple of ‘interesting animal facts’-type books. But their excretory habits, or rather the potential use of what they excrete, is now raising them to a whole new level of interest.
- University press release
- The potential of plant biomarker evidence derived from rock hyrax middens as an indicator of palaeoenvironmental change. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2009.11.029
I lost my wonder of excrement cleaning out a barn decades ago. But this is science at the molecular level and who knows what they will find.
Is he wearing a lab coat?
I’ll suggest that Mann do some field work in bat caves.
How about the white cliffs of dover.
Why stop at rat piss when we also have bat poo and bird poo.
Seems like a wonderful bit of science work.
Presumably the urine deposits can be carbon dated and some isotope ratio used to estimate dryness.
Winkling out a robust climate series out of this notwithstanding the numerous confounding factors should provide work for a small legion of PhD students.
While Dr. Chase and colleagues are “remodeling the loo” there is probably a very long line of anxious, cross legged, constipated Rock Hyrax’s lined up across the desert. Think they will need therapy?
I grew up with these little beasties all around us – and I thought they were just leopard fodder…
Medieval Warm Period in the SH? Could be interesting! But by the geography department – probably find the capital of Hyraxia was built on the confluence of two streams.
While I am here, polistra says:
October 13, 2010 at 7:04 am
“Hmm. Rock Hyrax … wasn’t she a Hustler centerfold back in the good old ’70s?”
I think you are correct and if my memory serves me, she was followed by Crystal Meth & Sharia Law on successive months.
But the Bristlecone rat pee is a better proxy.
Men pee in car parks after a night in the pub, so at least that accounts for the warming in the C20th.
[SNIP- sorry, but that comment will turn into flame bait all over the web at pro AGW sites, while funny, I’m not going to post it here, because it paints AGW proponents unfairly with a broad brush – Anthony]
In the future there will appear studies on the relation of climate change with bed wetting activities, caused by the current ingestion of a beverage known in prehistoric times as “Kool-Aid”. 🙂
“The Rock Hyrax is a remarkable animal. Native to dry, rocky environments throughout Africa, you would be forgiven for assuming that it is a large rodent, with its short legs, short neck, rounded ears and overall resemblance to a particularly large guinea pig or a coypu minus a tail.”
Gee, thankee kindly! I always like to hear about my relatives back home.
Brilliant!!! Have a Guinness. I always said WUWT was full of piss and vinegar. (Still looking for the vinegar…)
– Rock
This is by no means a new technique. It has been used for decades with packrat middens in the southwest. It is superior to e. g. pollen analysis because the packrats collect a very good sample of the surrounding vegetation, including species which produce little pollen and are therefore underrepresented in pollen counts.
If one has a large enough sample of the flora from a particular time and place it is usually possible to determine the climate (or at least the temperature of the warmest and coldest months) with fair precision since the climatic envelopes of the plants are well known. The uncertainty is typically on the order of plus or minus 2-3 degrees F.
Digging in Anasazi Indian toilets, it was discovered that the war between the Wadders and Folders was raging even in those times.
I don’t think this research passes the sniff test!
Wee is not something to be sniffed at! Hhave you ever been to Pompeii. Now, that was place to be in (at pre Vesuvius time I mean), they had pubs there where drinks were served for free, with a large pissoir, where customers were expected to return compliments, and so accumulated liquid was used for leather tanning and other ‘industrial’ purposes.
Wee is also good disinfectant, if you have an injury and no other disinfectant at hand, wee will do the job.
It is said that Gandhi consumed regularly jars of his own.
Dassie (hyrax) skins, when properly tanned and stitched skin-to-skin with fur on the inside AND outside, make the very best karosses which double-up as really warm bedding!
Now the kleintjies are helping science! Amazing.
This gives new meaning to “green-pees”. ;-> (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
tty:
I agree, but pollen count can be used any-where in the world where plants grow. Animals and people are usually very choosy in what food they eat, so that can also skew results in plant count. One must also check the soil at that level to determine any soil deficiency that would effect plant growth, etc.
I am really stumped as to what relationship hyrax piss deposits could have to climate!
As inaccurate as they are as a proxy, at least there is something resembling logic behind dendrology (although there are so many complications that I don’t buy the results peddled by Briffa & Co.)
Urine is very biodegradable, and the degree of ambient moisture, temperature etc. would influence this. I would expect the drift of archeological results would be so severe, that all a researcher would likely obtain would be some rather smelly hands and ruined pants.
So is this where grad students who don’t toe the AGW line are sent until they repent and write a paper linking the midden mundane to the carbon forced sublime?
Why the heck are anachronistic geographers doing paleobiological/botany/carbon dating work. I guess they have nothing left to do since the world turned out to be round and meticulously measured. They had a temporary foray into economics with stuff like they grow coffee in Brazil etc. that school kids had to memorize. Geography, once a grand discipline when they were trying to determine if the world was flat or round and became hotter as you went south into hell’s fires. The map has since been completed and the old Geoid is somewhat pear-shaped as it turns out. Does Leicester also have an alchemy department where they study the four elements? Give geography a decent burial.
This is hardly new. Those interested in their world read this years ago. No deniers yet.
Now I have to click on Climate Progress. I can’t let the Tony claim more hits, even if that’s a poor metric.
REPLY: Thanks and with that comment, your pettiness shines brightly for all the world to see. – Anthony
I guess it’s a good thing for science that the Rock Hyrax doesn’t have the same potty habits as our two miniature dachshunds who have to find a new place to go – every time.
I do paleo and modern poop (fish bones therein) and I happen to manage just fine at cocktail parties, thank you very much. It just takes some panache.
I have to take care to wear washable fabrics, however – to take care of the inevitable spray that ensues when asked what I do and I respond “I do s&#t.”
re: SNIP
———-
Yeah, I figured that was a bit over the line—I would loved to have seen Josh draw it up —but I don’t think I was the only to visualize it 😉