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Giant pandas have been seen smearing themselves with horse manure in the wild, and the sweet smell of scat isn’t the only reason – it appears the manure (phân) helps them tolerate low temperatures, according to a study.

Unlike insects that make a beeline for faeces, digging for olfactory (ngửi, khứu giác) cues to locate food, attraction to excrement (phân) across mammal species is rare. But researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences observed that a giant panda subspecies in China’s Qinling Mountains tended to seek out and sniff fresh horse manure and then roll over it.

The researchers set up infrared (hồng ngoại) cameras in the wild between July 2016 to June 2017 and captured 38 events of this rolling behaviour, which mostly occurred when the ambient temperature was less than 15C (59F).

The behaviour also appeared to be linked to droppings (phân thú) that were less than 10 days old. When the scientists compared fresh manure to older excrement, they found that the fresh faeces was rich in two compounds: beta-caryophyllene and caryophyllene oxide.

Owing to the apparent temperature correlation, the scientists wondered whether the two compounds were somehow implicated in the thermal sensation of mammals, so they conducted another experiment. They treated one group of mice with the two compounds and another group with saline, finding that the compound-treated mice tolerated cold temperatures better.

The researchers then found that at a molecular level the two compounds interact with a thermosensitive pathway in pandas, inhibiting (ức chế) cold activation, they said in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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