Part of the wonder of life on Earth is just how diverse it is.
Although we’re all familiar with domesticated animals like cats and dogs, the variety of life is too much for anybody to completely understand. For example, scientists recently took an interest in an adorable species of marsupials native to Australia. We’re talking, of course, about wombats. For those who don’t know, wombats have short legs and muscular bodies and are known to burrow into the ground with their sharp teeth and powerful claws.
Still, wombats also have another feature about them that’s not so cute—though it is very interesting to animal scientists.
The mystery surrounding wombats has to do with their feces.
In general, wombats are known to poop up to 100 or more times a day, typically doing it as they walk around and using it as a way to mark their territory. Although this seems straightforward, what puzzled scientists is that wombats seem to be the only animal that can leave cube-shaped dropping. After all, the physics of the process would seem to suggest that their droppings would look like any other animal with a similar physiology.
All of these questions led to a series of unusual studies.
Earlier this year, a researcher named Patricia Yang took it upon herself to research the issue more closely.
Yang’s research specialized in bodily fluids, though the question about wombats remained open-ended for her and her team. To get to the bottom of the issue, Yang and her team had to wait to study a set of wombat entrails to look at the system from the inside out. Though it took some time, eventually her team was able to obtain some intestines from wombats that had been accidentally killed on the road in Australia.
After taking a closer look, what she and her team found was quite remarkable.
According to Yang, the initial idea was that maybe their bodies were shaped differently than most animals’.
“At first I thought they maybe have a square anus, or maybe [the cube] forms right around the stomach,” she said. Still, this turned out to be incorrect. What actually affected the end result was how the intestines stretched throughout the digestive process. After looking closely at the elasticity of pig intestines, the team found that elasticity was relatively the same throughout.
Wombats, on the other hand, have two distinct parts of their intestines with different elasticities.
As a result of the study, Yang’s team found a possible answer as to how an organic system like a wombat digestive tract could make a cube.
As it turns out, the upper part of the intestines generally held waste that was much softer and more of a liquid. At the very end of the intestines, however, the walls were much less flexible and exerted a lot more pressure. As a result, the combination of soft and hard pressure results in droppings that have one of the rarest shapes found in nature: a cube.
The results were presented at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia—and they have lots of implications beyond animal science.
Although the question about wombat poop is curious enough on its own, it may also have ramifications on manufacturing and engineering.
Because we often take cues from nature when it comes to how we make things ourselves, the way wombats poop may present a “third option” for how to manufacture things in a cubic shape. “In the built world, cubic structures are created by extrusion or injection molding, but there are few examples of this feat in nature,” authors of the study said. With further study, scientists and engineers could find a hybrid way to form cubes based on these wombat mechanics.
Who knew these discoveries would have such wide-ranging impacts?
Though this is not yet an open-and-shut study, the results offer a promising answer for a question never before investigated.
While this story is a little bizarre and maybe a little gross for some, it provides an interesting window into the natural world. All of our bodies are natural machines and we often let them go unexamined. By looking at them more closely, we can gain a greater understanding of ourselves and of the world around us.
Congratulations to Dr. Yang’s team on their exciting discoveries!
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