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.