Discussion
In Lapalala Wilderness, the defecation rates at the
monitored brown hyaena defecation sites were
generally low, mostly with , 1 deposited scat/site/
month, and often with no deposited scats over a
period of three months. We suggest two, not
necessarily exclusive, explanations for our result.
First, low defecation rates suggest that brown
hyaenas do not reuse the same sites regularly for
defecation in this area, and only rarely defecate at
previously used defecation sites. Therefore, it is
questionable if the sites monitored in our study can
be referred to as latrines in a strict sense; i.e.
locations where large accumulations of faeces occur
due to repeated defecation, sometimes almost
exclusively at these specific locations (sensuGorman
& Throwbridge 1989). Instead, they may represent
sites that hyaenas frequently visit for scent marking
using other means (e.g. pasting; Mills et al. 1980),
and they only defecate at these sites ad hoc.Asecond
explanation for our results could be that we
underestimated defecation rates in our study due
to methodological error. This could have happened
in two different ways. We could either simply not
have detected all deposited scats, or scats had
degraded within the time between visits (mainly one
week). Several lines of evidence contradict both of
these explanations. We searched a total of 87 sites,
either weekly or daily over a period of three months.
It is therefore unlikely that we have missed enough
scats to have caused such a strong bias in our results.
The initial number of scats at many of the identified
defecation sites was also low, which further suggests
that they had not been used regularly.Moreover, it
is not likely that scats had degraded within one week
(our interval between latrine visits) since all detected
scats were white and calcium rich, and previous work on spotted hyaenas suggests that such scats
are not attractive to dung beetles (Cambefort 1984,
Krell et al. 2003) and can remain visible for 14
months (Bearder & Randall 1978).