When nature calls, wombats poop out a masterpiece – a pile of cube-shaped BMs, the only animal known to do so. And now scientists can finally know how wombats pull off this feat, according to a new study published online Thursday (Jan. 28) in the aptly named journal Soft matter.
The wombat, a small, tunnel-shaped marsupial that lives Down Under, has blocky poops due to the shape of its intestines, the international team of researchers found.
Previously, some researchers had falsely suggested that the shape of the wombat’s anal sphincter led to the animal’s distinctive feces, just as Play-Doh can appear in different shapes when pushed through different extruders. Even unpublished research presented by the same team at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics conference in 2018 not completely clear the exact parts of the intestine responsible for the boxy dung, even though he won one Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.
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But now, after studying the wombat gut tissue, we examined one CT scan (computed tomography) of a live wombat with bare nose (Schizophyllum) and using mathematical models, the team learned that the cubic geometry of the poo likely originates from the last 17% of the wombat’s intestinal tract. The wombat gut is long, about 32 feet (10 meters), or about 10 times the length of its body. But four places – two that are stiffer and two that are more flexible than the rest of the gut due to changes in muscle thickness – are crucial for the cubic feces to form, the researchers found.
It is likely that these areas of different muscle thickness help form the sharp corners of the cubes as the gut undergoes rhythmic contractions, the researchers said. “The angles are created by faster contraction in the stiff areas and relatively slower movement in the center of the soft areas,” the researchers wrote in the study.
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Moisture, or lack thereof, also plays a role. Unlike humans, whose digestive process takes one to two days, a wombat takes up to four times longer, allowing the marsupial to extract the greatest nutrition possible. The wombat’s intestines are also excellent at extracting water, which explains why their poop is a third drier than humans. This drying process, which largely takes place in the last part of the colon, known as the distal colon, likely helps the wombat keep its poo in a dice-like shape.
The idea for the study began when co-researcher Scott Carver, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Tasmania, dissected a wombat cadaver while on a research project to treat scabies, a skin disease caused by parasitic mites. They were known to place these feces at prominent points in their habitat, such as around a rock or block, to communicate with each other, Carver said in a statement. But it was not clear how they made these cubic feces.
That mystery, which has now been solved, could help scientists assess the wombat’s health. “Sometimes [captive wombat] feces are not as cubic as the [wild] ones, ” study co-researcher David Hu, a biomechanics researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Science magazine. In other words, wombats with squarer brushings can have healthier guts.
Additionally, “These results could have applications in manufacturing, clinical pathology and digestion,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Originally published on Live Science.