The tests will enable us to tell whether the dung samples come from one bird or several, and to establish family relationships between the birds. Scientists know little about cassowaries, despite their significance to the functioning of the rainforests and their attraction to tourists. Cassowaries look like stocky, stout-legged emus. But their neck and head are brilliant shades of red, purple and blue, with spectacular wattles dangling from their necks. Dr Westcott says cassowaries eat a wide variety of rainforest fruits and produce dung with much of the fruit still intact.
Cassowaries help regenerate the rainforest by dispersing large seeds over considerable distances.
But we know surprisingly little about how far they move over a season, or about their mating and breeding patterns. Dr David Groth of Curtin University is working on the DNA side of the experiment, and the cloning, sequencing and the genetic analysis will be done in Perth. DNA technique has been used to analyse populations and determine the parentage of brown bears in Europe, and Major Mitchell cockatoos and other birds in Australia. We are at the early stages of sequencing the DNA of cassowaries so that we have a baseline to compare against our dung samples. The hard part is establishing the basic DNA 'fingerprint' of the cassowary in the first place.