19
November 2018
Scientists
say they have uncovered how and why wombats produce cube-shaped poo - the only
known species to do so.
The
Australian marsupial can pass up to 100 deposits of poop a night and they use
the piles to mark territory. The shape helps it stop rolling away.
Despite
having round anuses like other mammals, wombats do not produce round pellets,
tubular coils or messy piles.
Researchers
revealed on Sunday the varied elasticity of the intestines help to sculpt the
poop into cubes.
"The
first thing that drove me to this is that I have never seen anything this weird
in biology. That was a mystery," Georgia Institute of Technology's
Patricia Yang said.
After
studying the digestive tracts of wombats put down after road accidents in
Tasmania, a
team led by Dr Yang presented its findings at the American Physical
Society Division of Fluid Dynamics' annual meeting in Atlanta.
"We
opened those intestines up like it was Christmas," said co-author David
Hu, also from Georgia Tech, according to Science News.
The team
compared the wombat intestines to pig intestines by inserting a balloon into
the animals' digestive tracts to see how it stretched to fit the balloon.
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