Why do wombats make a cubic poos? Smart News

Like the children's book Everyone Poos we have learned, creatures of all shapes and sizes create a range of poo, and they are all natural and good. Well, maybe except for poop of the wombat; something weird is going on there. The Australian marsupial throws small stacks of cube-shaped poo. Naturalists and biologists have been wondering for years how the round and winding plumbing found in most animals could produce an end product resembling that of a brickyard.

A new study presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Fluid Dynamics Division of the American Physical Society in Atlanta over the weekend seems to have finally solved the problem. When Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, discovered cubic wombat poop, she decided to understand the mystery. She specializes in the hydrodynamics of bodily fluids, including food, urine and blood, but has never found anything similar to wombat cubes.

"The first thing that has led me to that, is that I have never seen anything so strange in biology. It was a mystery, "she said in a press release. "I did not even believe it was true at first. I googled it and I saw a lot on the cube – shaped wombat poop, but I was skeptical.

To study the strange process that converts herbs into cubes of zombies, Yang and his team acquired the wombat intestinal tract from Tasmanian animals that had to be euthanized after being hit by cars and began to study their unusual digestive system. .

As reported by George Dvorsky of Gizmodo, the team found that food normally moves in the wombat's intestines in the form of liquid sludge for most of its two-and-a-half-week trip into the creature's system. Towards the end of this long journey, however, things have changed. As the poop entered the remaining 8% of the intestine, it began to firm up and form a series of cubes. Previous studies had reached the opposite conclusion: some had speculated that poo was transformed into cubes at the beginning of the small intestine.

By blowing up the intestines like nightmarish balloons and comparing them to pork intestines, Yang and his team determined that the wombat's intestine had different elastic properties that exerted unequal pressure on the droppings, creating a unique shape. . There are two visible grooves in the wombat bowel where the elasticity is different. Pig intestines, on the other hand, had uniform elasticity. As poop advances across the wombat, the different pressure of the intestine squeezes it into the shape of the cube, in the manner of a fun Play-Doh Play Factory.

"It's really the first time I've ever seen anyone come up with a good biological and physiological explanation," Mike Swinbourne, a Wombat expert at the University of Adelaide, told Tik Root. National Geographic.

Cubes are not just an accident of nature. They are part of the lifestyle of the wombat. The animals produce between 80 and 100 stinking cubes a night, and each cube measures nearly an inch on either side, reports Dvorsky. Because they have poor eyesight, animals rely on their stiffeners to find a partner. They use the nauseating cubes to communicate by marking their territory so that their companions can find them. It is thought that their cubic form prevents turtles from rolling.

The process could also have non-shitty applications. Devices designed to function as a wombat stern with a variable elastic pressure could lead to new manufacturing technologies.

"Molding and cutting are the current technologies for making cubes," Yang told Dvorsky. "But the wombats have the third way. They form cubic feces through the properties of the intestines … We can learn from wombats and hopefully apply this new method to our manufacturing process. We can understand how to move this material very efficiently. "

This means that someday we may be able to use artificial wombat intestines to create products such as bricks or candies, although this is a factory tour we might decide to jump .

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