Various jungle animals use one type of tree as a latrine

A number of arboreal mammal species have been found in the forest canopy, including opossums, two-toed sloths, and wildcats.

Jeremy Quirós-Navarro, an independent environmentalist in Costa Rica at the time first discovered the latrine 30 meters above a fig tree while looking for somewhere on the plain to place a camera. He saw a natural plateau, littered with various colors and textures of feces. Later he noticed other latrines, always on the same species: Ficus tuerckheimii.

Quirós-Navarro and his colleagues set video traps on one latrine in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. Two months later, they were amazed to find that 17 different mammal species had used it.

“It was crazy,” he says. “It’s almost the total number of crown mammals you can find in a cloud forest.”

There were about three visits a day. Feral cats known as margays would spray urine there, apparently to mark territory. The porcupine toilet and rubbed the branches, leaving a scent. Possums, white-cheeked capuchins and coatis passed through, as did howler monkeys and weasels.

Even two-toed sloths, which were thought to defecate only on the ground, did it there.

The team checked 170 other trees and found additional latrines, but only in this species of fig strangler. There are now anecdotal reports of strangler figs also providing latrines in Honduras and Borneo, Quirós-Navarro says.

This sharing of toilets is “fascinating and very unusual”, he says Neil Jordan at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who was not involved in the study. “It’s super hard to study animals 30 meters up in the canopy. So it’s no wonder it wasn’t discovered earlier.”

Some land-dwelling animals, such as rhinos and hyenas, are also known to use communal latrines. Scientists believe these sites allow the animals to mark territory, exchange information about each other, provide markings, and keep feces in one place — in part so predators can’t sniff it out elsewhere.

The strangler fig is a spectacular plant that gradually envelops its host tree and often kills it. Ficus tuerckheimii has a cluster of branches at canopy height “like an [upturned] hand,” says Quirós-Navarro, creating a “comfortable, centrally protected well.”

Its extra-long branches—estimated at 12 meters—provide highways even across rivers, which can make them disproportionately important in the forest.

The trees are popular with climbers, some of whom camp on the latrine platforms. Quirós-Navarro fears that “by simply disrupting one [strangler fig] tree, you can affect the entire communication between one forest and another”, with ripple effects on the ecology.

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