Researchers know that animals’ lifestyles leave chemical traces in hair. In horses, tail hair analysis is beneficial as the long hairs can provide information collected over a long period of time. But determining the exact period of time that corresponds to a segment of hair is not an easy task, as hair does not grow at the same rate in all horses. But researchers at Vetmeduni Vienna, in Austria, have developed a method to correctly assign individual hair growth to seasons and, thus, to a specific time frame.

A common method for learning more about an animal’s ecology and behavior is to analyze his hair’s chemical composition. This involves analyzing isotopes, which are variants of a chemical element with different atomic weights. The ratio of different isotopes of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in a sample can provide important insights on water intake, nutrition and habitat.

Martina Burnik Šturm, PhD, and Petra Kaczensky, Dr. Rer. Silv., from the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, set out to investigate the ecology of free-ranging horses and wild asses in Mongolia’s Gobi desert to find out how different wild equid species live together in the Mongolian Gobi, what they eat and drink, and how they migrate via the animals’ hair.

Tail hair can provide researchers with information about the ecology and behavior of Przewalski’s horses, wild asses, and free-ranging domestic horses in the Mongolian Gobi. All three species share the same habitat in a strictly protected 9,000 square meter area of southwest Mongolia