The mystery of the square shit of the wombat has been revealed

Frustrated when your digestive system does not take into account your need for long periods of uninterrupted sleep? Be grateful not to be an Australian Wombat. These creatures produce up to 100 stools in one night. And unlike any other creature of the animal kingdom, this marsupial poop. We are not talking about rounded shapes that could be described as cubes.as. We are talking about real cubes, like in a six-sided Rubik's Cube cube.

This is not because they have square anuses. It was also my first thought. The wombats have rounded anuses, just like the rest of the mammals. They do not shape their poop into cubes after adoption, it has nothing to do with pre-existing forms in the foods they consume. When a team of scientists led by Patricia Yang, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, discovered a problem of Wombat destruction in Tasmania, they turned to the intestines for answers. They discovered that "the various elastic properties of the wall of the intestine … preferably extend to facilitate the formation of cubes". Net and uniform cubes of 2 cm.

Getty ImagesSimon McGill

But why? How is cubic poop more advantageous than pellets, tubes, coils or just spongy piles? Let us remember from September 1835, when Charles Darwin noticed the curved beak forms of the Galapagos finches: "In the same way that a knife that cuts all kinds of things can have almost any form," writes Darwin in The origin of species, "A tool for a particular object should have a particular shape."

What finches ate required the most appropriate beak The ground chaffinch uses its crushing beak to eliminate back ticks from turtles and iguanas. The woodpecker and cactus have pollenters to find larvae in holes and branches of dead trees. The sharp-billed vampire finch pecks the flesh of the red-footed boobies to feed on their blood, while the seed-and-fruit eaters have a claw-shaped beak to grind and crush their food.

This is just to say that poo wombat "In all its cubic glory" it's not an accident. "Natural selection, you must never forget, can act on every part of every being, only and to his advantage," Darwin reminds us. Square shit does not roll, even if it is placed on a slope, the smell post remains intact and the territory is safe. In addition, the wombats figured out how to stack it as if my child stacked his blocks – higher up, the better it is for the fragrance to spread further. (The members of the jury want to know if the men in the competition are trying to be damaged, but if they look like my kids, they would do it totally.)

"We currently have only two methods to make cubes: we mold or cut them," says Yang. "We now have this third method." The next time you plan to build "non-axisymmetric structures using soft tissue," look no further than the Australian Wombat.