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posted by chromas on Wednesday May 20 2020, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the Tux's-Turds dept.
from the 🐧💨
dept.

Scientists suffer headaches when penguin poop turns into 'truly intense' laughing gas:

King penguins are big birds. The Antarctica residents eat a lot of seafood and make a lot of guano. It's all part of the circle of life, but it's created some challenges for scientists researching the birds.

University of Copenhagen professor Bo Elberling contributed to a penguin-poop study published this week in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The paper investigated the relationship between the bird guano and fluxes in soil greenhouse gases. Nitrous oxide[*], widely known as laughing gas, is one of those gases.

"Penguin guano produces significantly high levels of nitrous oxide around their colonies. The maximum emissions are about 100 times higher than in a recently fertilized Danish field," Elberling said in a University of Copenhagen release.

[...] The research team analyzed soil and feces samples collected in Antarctica. The king penguin diet is high in nitrogen. What goes in one end comes out the other. Once on the ground, soil bacteria goes to work turning the nitrogen into laughing gas.

"After nosing about in guano for several hours, one goes completely cuckoo," Elberling said. "One begins to feel ill and get a headache."

Journal Reference:
Peiyan Wang, Ludovica D'Imperio, Elisabeth M. Biersma, et al. Combined effects of glacial retreat and penguin activity on soil greenhouse gas fluxes on South Georgia, sub-Antarctica, Science of The Total Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135255)

[*] Wikipedia entry on Nitrous Oxide (N2O)

See also Researchers go cuckoo: Antarctic penguins release an extreme amount of laughing gas


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:43PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:43PM (#997047)

    > explain why Penguins walk so funny?
    Or maybe it's the headaches, they can't hold their head in their wings for relief.

    Odd, we did nitrous (at college parties-1970s) and I don't recall getting a headache. Always seemed like the perfect party drug--after a few minutes you come back down and there is little risk of driving impaired. Maybe there are other gasses in the penguin poop that leads to headaches?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:24AM (#997261)

    There is certainly something in public toilet areas that invoke headaches and nausea in me.