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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the because-they-can dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Scientists explain how wombats drop cubed poop

Wombats, the chubby and beloved, short-legged marsupials native to Australia, are central to a biological mystery in the animal kingdom: How do they produce cube-shaped poop? Patricia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, set out to investigate.

Yang studies the hydrodynamics of fluids, including blood, processed food and urine, in the bodies of animals. She was curious how the differences in wombats' digestive processes and soft tissue structures might explain their oddly shaped scat.

During the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, which will take place Nov. 18-20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, Yang and her co-authors, Scott Carver, David Hu and undergraduate student Miles Chan, will explain their findings from dissecting the alimentary systems, or digestive tracts, of wombats.

"The first thing that drove me to this is that I have never seen anything this weird in biology. That was a mystery," said Yang. "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."

[...] So, why do wombats poop cubes? Wombats pile their feces to mark their home ranges and communicate with one another through scent. They pile their feces in prominent places (e.g., next to burrows, or on logs, rocks and small raises) because they have poor eye sight. The higher and more prominently placed the pile of feces, the more visually distinctive it is to attract other wombats to smell and engage in communication. Therefore, it is important that their droppings do not roll away, and cube-shaped poop solves this problem.

Yang hopes that the group's research on wombats will contribute to current understandings of soft tissue transportation, or how the gut moves. She also emphasized that the group's research involved mechanical engineering and biology, and their findings are valuable to both fields. "We can learn from wombats and hopefully apply this novel method to our manufacturing process," Yang said. "We can understand how to move this stuff in a very efficient way."


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  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:57AM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:57AM (#764554) Journal
    At the time I submitted the story, it was not available on ScienceDaily. FWIW, I use noscript (so no scripts run at all) and phys.org loads just fine for me using the Pale Moon browser.
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