The fact thatwombatsuse their poop to tick off their territory is n’t strange in the animal realm . What does separate them from their furry peer is the distinctive shape of their droppings . wombat are the only brute to poop square block , according toScience News , and researchers think they have finally figured out how they do it .
Mechanical engineers David Hu and Patricia Yang at the Georgia Institute of Technology received a lovely gift of two quick-frozen wombats — roadkill , mind you — from an Australian colleague . After dissecting the specimens , they analyzed the animals ’ gut and discovered that they ’re incredibly stretchy . wombat ' intestines amplify to two or three times their original width when feces passes through , the researchers reported at an yearly encounter of the American Physical Society ’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in Atlanta .
To try out the elasticity of unlike sections of bowel , the investigator took close balloons ( the kind used to make animal shapes ) and inflated them inside the organ . Not all of the section were stretchable , though , and Yang evoke that the fuddled areas might help form the edges of the poo cubes as permissive waste gets pushed through the last few feet of intestine . ( Wombat digestive tracts value about 30 to 40 feet , according toanother studyof digestion in wombat . )
The final eight percentage of the gut is also where the stool changes from “ a liquidness - like state into a solid state indite of separated cube , ” each quantify about three - stern - of - an - column inch in length , consort toresearchers .
The reward of wombats ' oddly - form dung , according to Science News , is that they ’re practiced for stack and they do n’t roll off rocks as well . wombat lean to farm 80 to 100 turds per night , and they favor to deposit them atop rocks , logs , and batch of malicious gossip , where they can easily be seen . The scent also help them pilot better at nighttime .
Although telling in their own right , wombat are n’t the only beast whosefecal matterseem to defy aperient . Takesloths , for case : A single intestine bm can weigh up to a third of a sloth’sbody weight unit .
[ h / tScience News ]
