Today marks the day I finished sorting 257 civet poops and this is worth a blog post!
What do I do after collecting the civet scats?
Sort Sort Sort!
After collecting the civet scats from fieldwork, I bring them back to lab, weigh the samples and then preserve them in 75% ethanol. This is to kill any potential parasites and also to preserve the scats.
The next step to diet analysis would be to sort out the different types of plant (seeds/peel) and animal (bones/scales/feathers/hair) matters in each sample.
materials for sorting civet poop
I use a seive with a small mesh size for washing and transferring of samples, and white tray and forceps for sorting.
while sorting...
Sorted sample
Each type of plant and animal matter is then preserved in a separate vial and labelled. In this way, it would be more organised for microscopy, identification and data analysis.
Sorting is a simple but labour intensive procedure in Biology research projects. It is a common method used in biodiversity surveys e.g. diversity of crabs in mangroves or diversity of benthic invertebrates in freshwater streams.
My thesis is also about civet cats but Iam having hard time looking for more then 20 captive cats.
Mar/04/2011
Hi Tze Kwan, are you still into civets these days?
I live in a 3-storey house in Siglap. A few months ago I started seeing civet poops and “hearing” them around my house. A few days ago I saw them! One big and two small. They were climbing up the top of my house. I didn’t take any photo because it was too dark. And I was caught in surprise. This morning, I was able to video a young civet in my compound. I will upload the videos onto Youtube and provide the link later. You can hear the young civet calling for its parents!
One of the big civet is about 50cm in body length with an equally long tail. The smaller ones are about 20cm.
I read that palm civets (those at my place?) are no harmful to human. Should I do something to get rid of them? So far they didn’t cause any trouble except some poops on the roof.
You can contact me if you want to.
Bye for now
Hi Faiye and KL,
Thank you very much for your comments and for your interest in civets! =)
Please feel free to comment or contact me if you have information on the civets or if you have any enquiry. I will reply via email personally.
Thank you very much!
Best Regards,
Tze Kwan