Corinne Pisacane is a research technician in Endocrinology. She currently has an intern, Ria, who is studying with Corinne with the hope to one day to become an endocrinologist. They are currently working with the cheetahs at the Wild Animal Park testing them to discover if any are pregnant. Successfully breeding the cheetahs is proving to be difficult however and only one out of four trials has resulted in a birth. During our time spent with Corinne and Ria, we were taught how to analyze cheetah feces to document traces of hormones that would be present only if an animal is pregnant.

Working with feces can be a smelly job especially when dealing with carnivores. But examining the poop for hormones is a very important aspect of an endocrinologist’s job. Because hormones sometimes exist in higher concentrations in certain parts of the feces, they mix the poop sample by “smashing” it, as in the picture above. The next step is to add various chemicals such as methanol, ethanol, and maybe even ether, to the poop powder, weight it, and then measure the hormones.

We were given the opportunity to conduct a trial of our own. We were given vials of colored water that represented the different solvents that would bind to different hormones if a cheetah were pregnant. We measured the concentration of hormones present in our samples. This was the most exciting activity of the day and although we weren’t working with the animals themselves, just their poop, we felt like real scientists!

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