In the remote, hard-to-reach cloud forests of Costa Rica, is where you’ll find the rarest of toilets. Up there, quite literally among the clouds, is where you’ll find a communal bathroom shared by a variety of mammals high among the canopy, built into the branches of a strangler fig tree.
News of this highly exclusive and also just very high toilet comes to us from a team of researchers who recently published their findings in the journal Ecology and Evolution. A team of researchers who surveyed 169 trees in the Costa Rican cloud forests discovered 11 communal “latrines” located in the upper forks of the strangler fig tree. There were no other tree species that doubled as mammalian mountaintop bathrooms. For some very specific reason, mammals in the region like peeing and pooping off of and all over this one type of tree.
The team set up some camera traps to capture footage of the animals relieving themselves all over the tree, proving that there is a fine line between research and being a criminal perv with a toilet cam fetish. The recorded 17 different mammals visiting a single site, including porcupines, kinkajous, monkeys, and margays. The tree averaged a few visits a day, suggesting that this was routine behavior and not just random chance. To several mammal species in the region, this was not a tree: it was a gigantic toilet.
Why Animals Are Drawn to the Toilet Tree
As for why, the researchers suspect that strangler fig trees were already considered a “keystone” species in tropical ecosystems, meaning they offer everything an animal could need under one tree, like food, shelter, and pathways through the canopy. When you keep returning to one tree because it satisfies so many of your needs, you might as well let it satisfy a couple more.
The structure of its branches creates a wide, relatively flat plain that collects soil and debris, simulating conditions on the ground, which is good enough for animals that rarely actually touch the ground and spend most of their time among the branches. Hoffman’s two-toed sloths, for example, were once thought to slowly descend all the way down to the forest floor to poop. But then camera traps caught at least two of them stopping short of the ground and pooping all over one of these strangler fig tree branch platforms instead. It’s ultimately a nice compromise for the sloth. It gets to poop on something ground-like without having to face the dangers of life on the ground, an environment it’s not equipped to survive. This is especially true of these sloths captured in the footage, which were females with young babies. They didn’t want to run the risk of pooping on the ground.
This kind of multispecies restroom behavior isn’t new; it’s been observed before, but only ever on the ground. It’s best to think of it less as a tree and more as a roadside rest stop where you can relieve yourself while picking up some snacks before you head back out on the highway.
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