The shipments were rushed to the National Zoo overnight, packed in dry ice for the 400-mile trip.
A few pounds in weight, the containers went immediately into freezers until the contents could be thawed, processed and added to the formula of elephant calf Linh Mai.
The precious supplement: elephant poop.
Since Feb. 21, the zoo has been giving its 4-week-old female Asian elephant daily doses of feces from another elephant to treat diarrhea, National Zoo experts said.
The procedure is called a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) and has been used successfully in humans, dogs, horses and kangaroos, according to the zoo and scientific literature.
The zoo said it wasn’t sure if the treatment had been used on elephants before.
The idea is that feces from a donor with a healthy gut biome can infuse healthy bacteria into a disrupted biome and fight diarrhea caused by the disruption.
In this case, the feces came from a donor named Ollie, a 4-month-old Asian elephant at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium.
The National Zoo contacted the Columbus Zoo on Feb. 12, said Adam Felts, the vice president of animal care at the Columbus Zoo. Ollie, the youngest of that zoo’s two baby elephants, was picked to be the donor.
“We just chose Ollie because he was the youngest one, and that was going to be better for the calf at D.C.,” Felts said in a phone interview Thursday.
“They’re babies, and they defecate usually once a day,” he said. But they can be stimulated to poop and pee with baths or showers of warm water, which they love, he said.
So, Ollie was hosed down with warm water.
His feces was scooped up and stored in a freezer at the Columbus Zoo at a temperature of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, National Zoo spokeswoman Jennifer Zoon said in an email.
It was then packed in a cooler with dry ice for the trip to Washington. (A second shipment has also been sent.)
On arrival at the National Zoo, Ollie’s poop was filtered, homogenized and turned into a “slurry,” as the zoo put it.
Linh Mai has been getting two teaspoons in her formula six times a day. She is receiving the infusions over a 14-day period that ends Saturday. After that, the zoo will monitor her health and will resume the treatments if necessary.
The slurry doesn’t seem to produce an odor in the formula and doesn’t discolor it much, zoo experts said. Elephants are very smell focused, and Linh Mai has taken the concoction without complaint.
“It sounds gross,” Sally Bornbusch, a postdoctoral specialist in microbiome health at the zoo, said in a Zoom interview. “But this is a process we’ve used now for a couple different species. It does seem to work.”
The zoo has said that Linh Mai will make her public debut in the spring.
The trouble with the calf’s gut began 2½ weeks after she was born on Feb. 2 — the first elephant to be born at the zoo in almost 25 years.
Linh Mai, which means “spirit blossom” in Vietnamese, “was showing signs that there was an imbalance in her gut microbial community,” in the form of diarrhea, Bornbusch said. That can lead to dangerous dehydration.
“Diarrhea often indicates that there’s some sort of something going on in the gut both physiologically, nutritionally and potentially microbially,” she said. “So we were trying to treat all these things at once.”
Zoo clinical nutritionist Erin Kendrick said Linh Mai wasn’t gaining enough weight and seemed to be lacking energy. All of that indicated that the baby formula the zoo was giving the calf wasn’t working as hoped, she said.
The calf has not been able to nurse because her 12-year-old mother, Nhi Linh, has had trouble accepting her and has been aggressive toward her.
Linh Mai’s grandmother, Trong Nhi, has also exhibited unease around the calf.
The calf has been kept separate from her mother and grandmother, although she can see and touch them through a barrier. It’s not clear if any stress from the separation caused the diarrhea, Kendrick said.
Meanwhile, “in order to get a healthy set of baby elephant gut microbes, we needed to basically find a baby elephant donor,” Bornbusch said.
Poop from an adult elephant wouldn’t work because an adult’s diet is plant-based and a calf’s diet is milk, hence different gut microbes, she said. And there is no commercially available anti-diarrhea medicine for elephants, she said.
After a search of other zoos, Ollie was located and found to be an excellent candidate. The Columbus Zoo was happy to help.
“Especially in the elephant world, when somebody needs something, we all do what we can to help each other out,” Felts said. “Every baby matters, so we want to make sure this baby does well.”
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