Wombat poo is surprisingly cube shaped
Image: Barbara Triggs
In the world of digestion, cubic poo is very strange. Dr Patricia Yang, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, wasn’t sure if it was even real. “I have never seen anything this weird in biology,” said Patricia. “I didn’t even believe it was true at the beginning. I Googled it and saw a lot about cube-shaped wombat poop, but I was skeptical.”
To find out more, Patricia and her team turned to an Australian researcher, Dr Scott Carver from the University of Tasmania. Scott received two wombats that had been killed, sadly, in car accidents. He sent specimens from these wombats to the United States.
Patricia’s team looked at the contents of the wombat intestines, which were mostly liquid-like. It was only in the last eight percent of the intestine that the poo started to solidify and turn into cubes.
The researchers also tested the properties of the wombat intestines. After emptying the intestines, they filled them with long, thin balloons. The pressure of the balloons revealed some parts of the intestines were much stretchier than others. The differences in stretchiness at key points in the intestines lined up with where the poo cubes were formed.
This is a newly discovered technique for creating a very useful shape. “We can learn from wombats and hopefully apply this novel method to our manufacturing process,” says Patricia. “We can understand how to move this stuff in a very efficient way.”
Want to learn to identify animal droppings? Pick up a copy of our ‘Weirdest wildlife’ issue of Double Helix magazine from the CSIRO Publishing website.