![]() The wombat intestines, however, had a much more irregular shape. The pig intestine had a relatively uniform elasticity, which would explain the animal’s rounder poo. So Yang and the team expanded both wombat and pig intestines with a balloon to measure and compare their elasticities (or stretchiness). What she found to be more important was how the wombat intestines’ stretched.Īs food is digested it moves through the gut, and pressure from the intestine helps sculpt the feces-meaning that the shape of the intestine will affect the shape of a dropping. ![]() But neither of those hypotheses turned out to be the case. “At first I thought they maybe have square anus, or maybe forms right around the stomach,” she said. She wasn’t sure what to expect when they arrived. No zoos in North America had any, so Yang had the intestines of two roadkill wombats shipped from Australia. It took Yang and her colleagues months just to get ahold of wombat innards for their study. Finding answersįinding a more concrete answer, however, hasn’t been easy. Peter Clements, the president of the organization Wombats SA in Southern Australia, concurs, speculating that it’s a combination of the two. Moisture plays a role, but “it's also a factor of the primary digestive tract,” adds Bill Zeigler, senior vice president for animal programs at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, which has had wombats since 1969. Being dry helps the scats form more rigid shapes with sharper angles. And sometimes, in zoos, where the animals have readier access to hydration, Swinbourne says their scat is less cubic. “They have to really squeeze every drop of moisture out ,” he said. Instead, Swinbourne says the cubic shape is more likely related to the dry environments that most wombats live in. While wombats do use their scat to mark territory, “it's not like they're trying to build little brick pyramids,” he says. But Swinbourne says that’s a misconception. One popular postulate is that wombats make cubes so that they can stack them to mark their territory, without the pieces rolling away. “People have had all sorts of theories,” says Mike Swinbourne, a wombat expert at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But after confirming that it is, indeed, a fact, she began trying to figure out why, and how, wombats poop in cubes. In 2018, Patricia Yang, a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology who specializes in bodily fluids, started to look into the topic more closely after hearing about it at a conference. That’s left scientists largely in the dark about the phenomenon-until recently. While this peculiarity has sparked much interest and debate, actual research into the intricacies of wombat scat has been scant. But there’s something you might not know about these adorable marsupials: Wombats are the only animals in the world that produce cube-shaped poop. ![]() Wombats are a burrowing animal native to Australia perhaps best-known for being, well, pudgy-and quite cute.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |