Dung DNA Gives Clues to the Shy Okapi’s Lifestyle

Try to read up on the okapi and you wont find much. This African mammal is most often seen next tothe adjective elusive. But even if we cant find any okapi, we can learn about their lifestyle through their DNAand we can find theirDNA in their feces.

The okapi is an ungulate, like a cow. Or really like a giraffe, its closest relative. It has an elegant face, a long bluish tongue, and a zebra-striped rear end. It lives in the denserainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, chewing tree leaves in privacy. No one in the Western world knew the animalexisted until the 20th century.

One of the great things about studying okapi was that there was so little known about them in advance, says David Stanton, a PhD student at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. So in this sense, everything that we found out was a surprise.

Stanton and his coauthors just published an investigation of okapi society. Rather than search for actual wild okapi (elusive, remember?), they scoured the Reserve de Faune a Okapis, a national park in the DRC, for dung.

The researchers gathered 208 fecal samples. They were able to extract and sequence DNA from 105 of these samples,and confirmed that all 105 came from okapi. And evenwithout seeing any wild animals, the scientists could piece together a few clues about the okapislifestyle from that genetic material.

To start, they analyzed whether okapi that are more closely related live (and poop) closer to each other. Do the animals live in family groups? The answer was no. Except for mothers with offspring, related individuals do not appear to live closer together than unrelated individuals in any meaningful sense, Stanton says. The researchers concluded that okapi are solitary.

They could also get a peek at the animals sex lives through their dung. To do this, the scientistsused a computer program that sifted through the genetic sequences and looked for siblings. The program found one pair of full siblings (animals with the same mother and father). But there were around 200 sets of half-siblings among the animals. This suggested that okapi are polygamous; they dont stick with one mate.

Finally, the researchers investigated how widelyokapi move around.Judging by dung piles that had identical DNA, individual okapi didnt wander very far. Almost all of these matching piles were less than a kilometer apart.

Male okapi, though, were less closely related to each other than females. This suggests that before settling into a home range, males roam farther from where they were born. This system isnot unusual for mammals, though sometimes females are the ones who do the roaming, or dispersing.

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Dung DNA Gives Clues to the Shy Okapi's Lifestyle