Wombat's cube-shaped shit could solve a manufacturing mystery – Quartz

In the world of manufacturing, there are only two ways to create a cube. Either cut the desired six-sided shape into a larger piece of material, or mold it if the material is soft enough.

The wombats, marsupials living in Australia and Tasmania, which look like plump rodents, have been producing cubed feces since they evolved for the first time 20 to 50 million years ago. They are the only creatures of the animal kingdom to produce this type of poo, and this, inexplicably for years.

A team of researchers made up of mechanical engineers and wildlife experts may have understood how the wombats produce such strange excrement by examining the creatures' intestines. The trick seems to be that the end of the walls of their digestive tract has recurring patterns of elastic and firm tissues that shape the waste as they pass. The team, led by Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Institute Technology, presented its findings this week at the annual meeting of the Fluid Dynamics Division of the American Physical Society in Atlanta, Georgia.

Yang has procured the remains of two wombats that had been hit by cars in Tasmania. Although they were fatally wounded and euthanized, their intestines remained intact. "We opened these intestines as if it was Christmas," Science News told David Hu, co-author of the study, who runs the Georgia Institute's technology lab, where Yang works, (The Lab Hu's focus on solving excretory mysteries in the animal kingdom Hu received an Ig Nobel award three years ago for his research on the speed of urination of mammals.)

After cleaning the intestines of any remaining waste, the team spent long inflatable balloons through them to understand the flow of stool.

Wombats are herbivores and, like most herbivores, have a relatively long bowel compared to the size of their body to maximize the digestion of their fibrous food. Yang and his team have inflated nearly 30 meters of intestine per creature, each having a body about 3 feet long. (For comparison, the human intestines are about 25 feet long.) The intestines of most animals have uniform stretching abilities. Scientists discovered that, towards the end of the large intestine of the wombat, the walls of the walls varied. "The intestines of Wombat have a periodical stiffness, which means stiff-soft-stiff-soft, along the circumference to form cuboidal stools," Yang told the Guardian. In other words, when the waste is pushed into the intestines, the meeting of a firm part of the fabric creates unique flat faces.

The wombats use their excrement to communicate with each other; stacks of pellets indicate the property of a given territory. Their cubes form makes them ideal for stacking and, as the wombats have bad eyesight, the bigger the dung pile, the better it is.

In theory, the wombat method of making cube-shaped objects could be applied to manufacturing. You can push the material through a tube with both a shape and clear walls to give it a unique shape at the time of its release.

The team has not yet published a peer-reviewed document on this work. According to Science News, they are currently working on modeling a wombat gut with tights to see if they can imitate it in action.