Animals With the Weirdest Poop
Like the good book says, everybody poops. There’s no need to be weird about it. There’s some messed-up poop out there, though, and we’re not talking about your Uncle Jerry. Different animals have all kinds of science-fiction business going on in their bodies, with their multiple stomachs and corkscrew wangs and all, so it stands to reason that a lot of them poop strange. But we were not prepared to learn that…
Wombats Poop in Cubes
Due to how the colon works in most mammals, there’s only so many shapes poop can be. It may be longer or rounder or bumpier depending on the size of your Stanley, but it’s generally pretty tubular. Not for the bare-nosed wombat, the only animal that poops cubes. Scientists were stymied by it for years until they discovered “regions of varied thickness and stiffness” in the animal’s intestines, unlike the uniformity of those in other mammals, that push and pull the poop into cubes. In other words, it’s just a beautiful evolutionary accident.
Caterpillars Launch It in the Air
Much like frat boys, caterpillars can be located by the presence of their waste, so to keep predators away from their nests, they poop at the office before coming home. Just kidding, they point their butts out the door and launch their poop up to 1.4 meters away. That’s about 40 times the length of their bodies, meaning that if we could get the same proportional distance, we’d be shooting about two-thirds of a football field. And we would. There would be contests.
Capybaras Have Two Kinds of Poop
Next time you scroll past a video of capybaras, singing the capybara song, remember that you’re cooing over a bunch of shit-eaters. Because they can’t fully digest the grass they eat on the first round, they produce two different types of poop: soft green blobs full of nutrients from the grass for eating, essentially sending it through the system again, and hard brown-black nuggets for leaving alone. It seems like it would all get mixed up in there, but apparently not. Listen, we never said this wouldn’t be gross.
Owl Pellets Aren’t Poop
Remember dissecting owl poop in school? No, you don’t! Owl poop is fairly normal-looking bird poop. Those were owl pellets, which are masses of indigestible hair and bones that get separated from the meaty bits in the owl’s digestive system after it swallows an entire creature. Those masses are sent back up, not down. Yep, they basically poop out their mouths and their butts. (Sort of. Don’t get us started on bird butts.)
Parrotfish Poop Sand
Have you ever gazed longingly at photos of Hawaii’s white sand beaches, fantasizing about a life you were rudely not born into? You were gazing at fish poop. Fish poop as far as the eye can see. Specifically, the poop of the parrotfish, which eats algae-covered rocks and coral and poops out the ground-up dinnerware as sand.
So don’t get too jealous of influencers who can jet off to the Aloha State at a moment’s notice — they’re frolicking in sticky, granular shit.
