alt Hacker NewsHow do wombats poop cubes? (2021)
Comments
The always excellent Oatmeal:
We need to have a conversation about wombats
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats
Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.
"exceptional excrement" "sharp-sided scat" "To get to the bottom of the mystery" "...aptly titled journal Soft Matter."
Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.
I first read this in 2001 on an outhouse door while treking in Tasmania:
ODE TO THE WOMBAT
As you pound along the track
Eyes wide open and ears pinned back
You may have noticed those queer square turds
And thought, if not expressed in words,
The pain of such defecation
Baffles the imagination.
But it ain't done to entertain us—
The wombat has an oblong anus.
So if at night you hear pained cries
Outside your tent, feel no surprise.
With eyes shut tight, teeth clenched with pain,
A wombat's gone and crapped again!
All that work I did for my PhD and I could have been studying this topic instead...
A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:
> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."
The other article [1] quote:
> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-bui...
If someone hasn't submitted this for an Ig Nobel, it would be a calamity.
https://soundcloud.com/noamhassenfeld/wombat-song
My kids can't stop laughing
Wombat Song by Noam Hassenfeld
Ending of Vox Unexplainable Podcast on Wombat cube poops
even i am pooping cubes thanks to IBS-C since last 6 months. I have no idea how to reset it.
They eat six square meals a day!
I'll leave now...
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?
I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day
Interesting. I always thought stools had tapered ends to prevent the door from slamming shut.
Nature keeps finding engineering solutions we would never arrive at from first principles
This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]
[0]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-abstract/17/3/475/708006/Int...
[1]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-supplement/708006/mov/d0sm01...
"God does not play dice with the wombats." – Einstein (maybe.)
Related: drilling square holes, not as much fun as a wombat though.
I hard the pleasure to assist David Hu's talk a few years ago where he presented his work on feline tongues, frogs tongues and wombat poop. Really fun guy. I always wondered how he got his funding because studying the "physics of animals" must not be on the top of the list of most funding agencies.
Surely it has something to do with their square arseholes.
I was so confused by wombat poop the first time I saw it. Wasn't sure what I was looking at so I poked it with a stick.
> Wombat dissections show that cubes are formed within the last 17 percent of the intestine.
the article itself is paywalled, I wonder how did they get the wombats to dissect.
The pun in the title is just world class.
> Distinctive intestines mold feces into sharp-cornered poop
...written directly above a photo of the subject matter that clearly does not have sharp corners (which is all for the best, I guess, poor wombats!), not even sharp edges, just flattened sides.
No offence but reading this in the silence of my workplace, it was so difficult to control my giggling and laughter reading everyline and it just kept getting funnier XD
>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?
I was literally thinking this the other night ahahha, and forgot to ask ChatGPT in the morning; nice that I found the answer here.
Discipline
It’s hip to be square
well written and has a distinctly human feel to it, compared to the slop we get to read these days.
Mojang should add them as a mob... and then have their poop be little spheres.
I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:
Spit it out man! It means CUNT.
I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.