Walk around a forest in Canada and you can’t miss the precise piles of round animal poop: Deer, moose, and rabbits. But there is one animal in the world (that we know of) that poops in cubes and it’s a wombat. How does the Tasmanian mammal do that? Yes, serious researchers want to know. Biologists get to ask ridiculous questions like this when they grow up, and then try to answer them using tools from science. 

A team from the University of Tasmania has determined that a wombat’s surprisingly long and intermittently stretchy intestines compress their poop (or stool) into cubes. The team has now pinpointed another factor to making cube poop, which seems to apply to all animals that produce feces in pellet form: how the poo dries in the animals’ guts.

The research has been supported by the Ig Nobel Prize, the satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research.

In the latest study, researchers built an artificial wombat digestive system and passed corn-starch ‘poop’ through plastic troughs, simulating intestines and added heat lamps to dry them out. Greater drying resulted in more closely spaced cracks — wombat poo, which contains 65% water, cracked into little cubes.

Human poo, made up of 75% water, comes out in longer tubes, and cow pat, containing up to 90% water, just slops right out.

The researchers leading the wombat study is Scott Carver from the University of Tasmania and Georgia Tech’s Professor David Hu. They set out to crack the secret of the unique cubed poo of wombats: “There are many colourful hypotheses to explain the phenomenon, but nobody had ever investigated it. This research has been a fun effort to answer the questions of how and why,” says Carver.

How and why wombats produce cubed faeces has been a fascination to many people for a long time, he added. 

And there are applications in human health. Certainly you’ve seen photos or videos of how a healthy human poop should look? The scientists looking at wombat stool agree: “the methods and physical picture shown here may be of use to physicians and veterinarians interested in using feces length as a marker of intestinal health.”

If reading scientific papers is your thing, catch up on the latest wombat cubed poop research in: Drying dynamics of pellet faeces. And if you are interested in wombats, Womsat is helping protect them in Australia. If you are interested in doing science, check out our experiment using worms to eat plastic. 

Jokes aside about cubed wombat poop in Tasmania (it’s made so it doesn’t roll away in Tasmanian wind!), nature has the best technology. We study it so we can learn from it to make energy more efficient and medicine more attuned to our bodies. The field is also known as biomimicry. Wombats know why their poop is cubed. Do you?

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Live animal exports to Egypt from Australia have been suspended after Animals Australia – a leading animal rights organization who has exposed cruelty in the controversial export trade – revealed new evidence of widespread animal cruelty in the North African country. According to the Australia-based animal rights group, “investigators have recently returned from Egypt,” where they gathered evidence described as “damning, showing Australian cattle being subjected to brutal treatment in the country’s only two accredited abattoirs.”

As a result, Australian Livestock Exporters’ Council announced it was suspending the trade of animals to Egypt after it said publicly the new footage revealed actions by Egyptians that was “horrific.”

This is not the first time exports to Egypt have been suspended. In 2006, after other gross violations of animal rights and cruelty emerged, the trade was stopped, but was resumed later despite protests from Animals Australia and activists in Australia.

“Footage has been provided to the Federal Department of Agriculture. As a result, Australia’s live export industry — which has consistently lauded these facilities as being state-of-the-art — is in damage control. Late tonight they announced that they have voluntarily suspended the live trade to Egypt,” said Animals Australia in a statement published on their website breaking the news.

In December, Green Prophet reported that some 30,000 cows died on a ship destined for Egypt after the Egyptian government refused to allow the ship to dock at a Red Sea port. They were slaughtered as a “precaution,” the ministry said.

Animals Australia’s Campaign Director, Lyn White, said in a statement that the ship was anchored at sea after being refused port in a number of countries in the region, including Egypt, where the cattle were supposed to be offloaded.

It’s understood that ventilation problems on the converted livestock vessel, the MV Gracia Del Mar, had caused the deaths of more than half of the animals on board since the ship left South America for Egypt a few weeks ago.

The ship was anchored in the Red Sea for weeks and saw more animals perish as a result.

“This is nothing short of an animal welfare disaster. If remaining cattle are not offloaded more of these animals will suffer appalling deaths at sea. We are appealing to authorities in Egypt to offload the remaining cattle at al-Sohkna, as was originally intended.

“This disaster is just another example of the inherent risks of transporting animals by sea. It was only nine years ago that 5,000 Australian sheep perished on board the MV Cormo Express after country after country refused to allow it to berth.

“And this isn’t the first time that mechanical issues have caused mass deaths on live export ships. We only need to look to the breakdown of the Al Messilah in Adelaide last year. Had that vessel broken down on the open ocean it would have caused a similar welfare catastrophe — as thousands of animals would have died,” she said.

Image for illustration purposes via Liveexportshame

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