Question: What did you do as a zoologist?

Jessica Mitchell answered on 14 Nov 2019:

As a zoologist I mainly worked with mongooses and meerkats. These animals live together in big groups, are very smelly and often wipe their bums on each other and other things in their environment. I was interested in what information they were getting from each others smell. My research collected bum-juice (scent samples) from mongooses and I then presented these scent samples back to other mongooses to see how they reacted.

I found that mongooses respond differently to the smells of males and females, they also react differently to pregnant and non-pregnant females, and they avoid the smalls of sick animals. This told me that bum juice is a very important way of communicating if you are a mongoose!