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The wombat lives in lush Australian forests, grazes on grass and poops cubes. A study published Thursday in the journal Soft Matter examines the intimate mechanisms behind these feces.
This introduces two entries into the poop cube canon from a research team at Georgia Tech and the University of Tasmania. You have been with us since 2017 and published your first wombat findings at a conference a few years ago. In this work, they put a balloon in an intestine to examine the structure of its walls. They discovered that wombat intestines are made up of sections that differ in elasticity and thickness. For the new paper, they investigated further by dissecting three wombats and creating a model of how wombat innards form waste matter as they move through the intestines on the way out.
We obviously needed to know more. Slate spoke to Patricia Yang, the new study’s lead author and self-proclaimed defecation expert. This conversation has been condensed and edited for the sake of clarity.
Patricia Yang: I am an expert on feces. All of my doctoral thesis has been on urine, bowel movements, and digestion in humans.
When I was very young, I didn’t expect to be a feces expert. A few years ago, however, I had no idea what to research for my doctoral thesis. My counselor had just started potty training his son so we started talking and thinking about the urinary system. Then the defecation system.
One day I was speaking about human cylindrical feces at a conference, and after that an audience came up to me and said, “You need to see wombats. … you rolled feces. “I had no idea what they were talking about, but I Googled and it was so weird. The square geometric shape is very rare in nature. I didn’t really believe it until I saw a sample myself.
A wombat expert from Tasmania joined our team. Every time there was a roadkill wombat, he would get a call and pick the animal up for us.
The anus is circular. The cube is formed in the intestine and comes out as it is.
A cross-section of the intestine of the wombat is like a rubber band, the two ends of which are slightly stretched and the middle part hangs down. The rigid and elastic parts contract at different speeds, creating the cube shape and corners.
We know that they leave their droppings and use their scent to communicate with each other. Wombats produce up to 100 cubes a day, so they probably stack them up, but we’re not sure yet.
Put it this way, not many people study bowel stiffness. But we compared wombat and pig casings. Pigs have an even bowel, the stiffness and the speed of contraction are the same, so the feces come out in a circular manner. We believe that this is also the case with a healthy human gut. However, when any part of the human intestine becomes stiff, it is a symptom of colon cancer. We believe that partially stiff intestines can produce cornered feces – even in humans.
Once more research is done, we may find that corners in human feces are an early sign of colon cancer.
For them Cube making. Usually, you need a hard container to make cubes like ice cubes. But wombat poop shows for the first time how soft matter (the feces) can be formed with a soft container (the intestines).
I just can’t believe that everyone is so interested in this particular animal and its poop!
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