[ad_1]
With a protective bone shield and a thick layer of fat and muscle designed to repel predators invading the burrows, the wombats have a lot of strange things in the anatomy of their buttocks. A new document presented this weekend at a conference of the American Physical Society gives an insight into the most persistent mystery of the weird strange marsupial: the shape of its poo.
Wombat feces are cubic, a fact that you must remember in case this happens. This is not news, people have long wondered about cubic poop. Wombat poo thinkers have speculated that perhaps all three existing wombat species have a square anus that forms dry faeces in small, dense cubes when they travel to the world, or perhaps that the stomach of the wombat digests food in an unusual way. Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, found the real answer. She hopes her discovery will help humans find a new way to make cubes.
Yang has been searching for the truth after learning about the unusual shape of poo Wombat at a conference held earlier this year. She and her three coauthors got fresh intestines from wombats that were euthanized after being run over by cars in Tasmania. (The wombats are threatened by human encroachment, like many animals, as well as by sarcoptic mange, or scabies, a contagious skin disease.) For Yang, who at first did not believe that his excrement could to be cubic, given the rarity of this form in nature, seeing them in all their angular glory was "surprising," she says.
The team discovered that the poop in the upper parts of the intestine was liquid and soft, while the poop in the remaining 8% of the intestinal tract was the iconic form of the cube – and very, very dry. This last section of the entrails of the wombat has walls whose elasticity varies. The pressure of the feces against the walls form in cubes a little less than an inch in diameter.
"This work is a collaboration between engineers and biologists," says Yang. His co-author, Scott Carver, is a wildlife ecologist at the University of Tasmania. Yang hopes this discovery will help highlight the strange and wacky world of wombats and raise their profile. She also hopes that this discovery will provide information that can help the industry. "Right now, I'm thinking of food manufacturing," she told a press conference earlier in the day. Chocolate cubes are not her only concern: she also thinks about pet food, like hay bales for horses.
Although scientists now know how Wombat poo becomes square, we still have only hypotheses about why. According to Yang, the stackable form allows the wombats to clearly mark their territory in a sparse manner, but others are not. "I'm not totally convinced of the stacking idea," says Sunny Jung, a Cornell engineer who studies fluid mechanics in nature. Mike Swinbourne of the University of Adelaide, who studies wombats, said National Geographic He was not convinced either and had speculated that forcing the poo into an unusual shape was more likely to be a way of removing the last drop of moisture he so badly needed. As always, additional research is needed, but at least one persistent mystery has been solved.
[ad_2]
Source link
