"Field work is always challenging," explained Courtney Marneweck of South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal in a recent journal article, but studying the sociology of a white rhino's dung meant developing a "pattern-recognition algorithm" to figure out "smell profiles" of 150 animals' feces-after tracking them individually to observe them in the act. Wrote Marneweck, "I think my record for waiting for a rhino to poo was 7 1/2 hours."