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Discrimination of familiarity and sex from chemical cues in the dung by wild southern white rhinoceros

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Abstract

Communication in rhinos is primarily mediated by the vocal and olfactory signals as they have relatively poor eyesight. White rhinos are the most social of all the rhinoceros species, they defecate at common dungheaps and the adult bulls use dung and urine to mark their territory. Chemical communication may therefore be particularly important in the social interactions of white rhinos, and its knowledge could be very helpful in their management and conservation. However, no studies have investigated up until now the olfactory discrimination in any rhinoceros species in the wild. We have experimentally studied the reactions of the wild southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum) to the dung of familiar and unfamiliar adult females and adult territorial males. We registered the number of sniffing events, the duration of sniffing and the latency of the vigilance posture from the onset of sniffing. The dung of unfamiliar rhinos was sniffed longer than that of familiar rhinos. The rhinos showed a shorter latency of vigilance posture to the familiar dung of males than that of females. For unfamiliar dung, they displayed a shorter latency of vigilance posture to female than male dung. Our results indicate that the rhinos are able to discriminate the familiarity and sex of conspecifics from the smell of their dung. Olfactory cues could therefore play an important role in the social relationships and spatial organization of the southern white rhinoceros.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the management and owners of Welgevonden Game Reserve and Lapalala Wilderness for permission to conduct this study and for personal accommodation. We very much appreciate the helpfulness, advice and/or information on the studied animals from Jonathan Swart, Gerhardt Lorist, André Burger, Shaun McCartney and Hennie Roets of Welgevonden Game Reserve and Anton Walker, Hermann Müller, Elias Mangwane and Lin Insel of Lapalala Wilderness. We would like to thank Vítězslav Bičík, Stanislav Bureš and Norman Owen-Smith for their support of this study. The project was financially supported by the Internal Grant Agency of Palacký University in Olomouc PRF 2014-018 and by the mobility grant from Palacký University to IC. We are very thankful to two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments, which helped improve the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standard

The project was approved by the Ethical Commission of the Faculty of Science, Palacký University, and adhered to the “Guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioural research and teaching” as published by the ASAB (2012). The project complies with the current laws of South Africa and the Czech Republic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology and Laboratory of Ornithology, Faculty of Science, Palacký University, 17. listopadu 50, 771 46, Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Ivana Cinková

  2. Department of Ethology, Institute of Animal Science, Prague, Czech Republic

    Richard Policht

  3. Department of Game Management and Wildlife Biology, Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Richard Policht

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  1. Ivana Cinková
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Correspondence to Ivana Cinková.

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Cinková, I., Policht, R. Discrimination of familiarity and sex from chemical cues in the dung by wild southern white rhinoceros. Anim Cogn 18, 385–392 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-014-0810-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-014-0810-8

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