IWN Daily Digest — Saturday, 26 September 2026
Researchers have shown that the urine and scat tigers and leopards leave behind carry chemical clues to an animal’s species, sex, age and reproductive state, details that camera traps often miss.
As Mongabay India reported:
“Camera trapping and genetic sampling are big cat monitoring techniques that can estimate population size, density and identify individuals. But they often provide limited information about an animal’s age, sex, reproductive status or health.”
The team, from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Ahmedabad University and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, collected urine and scat from nine captive tigers and 15 captive leopards at Bannerghatta Biological Park in Bengaluru, Kamala Nehru Zoological Park in Ahmedabad and Sayajibaug Zoo in Vadodara. They also gathered 144 urine samples from 28 individually identified wild tigers in Rajasthan’s Ranthambore Tiger Reserve.
A machine-learning method called Random Forest then combed the volatile compounds in each sample for patterns. According to the study, the chemical profiles told tigers from leopards with about 79 per cent accuracy using urine and 75 per cent using scat. Sex and age proved harder to read, with tiger urine managing about 55 and 64 per cent respectively, while scat reached about 71 per cent for sex and 63 per cent for age.
Because the zoo tigers were not breeding, only the Ranthambore samples could test for pregnancy and lactation, and there a compound called nonanol turned up far more abundantly in urine from pregnant and lactating females than in non-reproductive ones. The researchers also found elevated levels of dimethyl tetrasulphide in the scat of a captive tiger being treated for epilepsy.
“The goal was to see whether you could ‘read’ biologically meaningful information — species, age, sex, even reproductive state — directly from the odours the animals leave behind, without ever having to catch, dart, or physically handle the animal,” said B.V. Aditi Prasad, the study’s corresponding author and now a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
Prasad said sample sizes, especially for wild tigers, remain small, and that accuracy was lower for males and older individuals. The researchers also caution that these chemical profiles can shift with diet and weather, and that tiger cubs, which generally do not mark territories, may not leave the urine signals the method depends on.
Sources: Mongabay India
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