Short Stuff: Squarer Than Wombat Poop

One of the cutest animals on the planet is also the only one that squeezes out cube-shaped poop. Find out why today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Ahoy, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's
chuck and this is short stuff about wombats. Is that
the sound they make? I know? But it is for
people who live outside of Australia. Okay, Well, this short
stuff came about just from our recording two days ago
on which one was that in? Was that in the appendix? Yeah?

(00:25):
Appendix because we talked about digestion and pooping. Yeah, and
you said something about wombats having square poop and I
was like what you were like yeah, and you, because
you're in front of my face, you showed me a
picture which was amazing. Didn't even maybe you texted it
to me too, because you're so used to doing that.
And I said, we should do with short stuff on
this and we are two days later, by god, and

(00:45):
we're doing it. We are we're talking about square poop,
square poop, square square poop. There, let's start to say
yeah and something else and it came out weird there there?
What's going on? I don't know? I will say this
though this after researching this, this really clears up that
old saying that I had heard since I was a

(01:06):
kid that had never got which is that guy as
square as wombat. I guess I've not heard that before.
You never heard that? Have you really heard that somebody
say that? Yeah, like some you know, you'll see some
nerd that guy is square as wombat. I was like,
what does that even mean? You just keep saying that. Huh.

(01:26):
I love it. I think we should start it. I
just made it up today, Okay. So regardless of all
these phrases, there's there's really only one animal on the
planet that poops in cubes, and that is the wombat.
And I think in particular the bear knows wombat, which
are by the way, chuck about is cute as they come. Yeah,
Australia has got two things. They have animals that will

(01:47):
kill you dead and animals that you only want to hug. Yes,
but sometimes I will kill you dead too, Yes, exactly.
That's that's the great thing about Australia. So these the wombats,
they're they're used described as stout. They're very thick, they
have short legs, but they're really powerful and they'd use
them to dig. They have long claws that they used

(02:09):
to dig subterranean burrows in and their cousins of the
koala and they kind of look like they look a
bit like a cross between a koala and a little
tiny bear, a stuffed animal, if we're basically, But I
suspect that because of those sharp clause you don't want
to get between a mama wombat and her baby wombat,

(02:29):
you know what I'm saying. Yeah, And they're also bigger
than I thought. For some reason, I thought wombats were
fairly small, but they weigh up to seventy seven pounds
or thirty five kilograms if you're in Australia. And uh,
they're pretty territorial, but they do share their space with
their friends. They is very cute. They will mark their

(02:52):
um trails and stuff with scent and those little cube
shape poops which I don't think we even mentioned yet.
They poop out a hundred six sided turds every single day. Man,
you use the T word, I mean, is that a
bad word? It's not bad, it's just it's one of
my most hated words of all. Well, it looks even

(03:13):
grosser spelled out for something. Everything about it is terrible.
It even itself even looks brown somehow, I'm not sure how,
but it does. Everything about it is wrong. Oh, I
don't know if I should say this now, I'm not
gonna say this. Go ahead, Okay, are we going to
leave that in there? Yeah, let's leave it in. And
people would be like, oh, man, but you said it's

(03:36):
six sided t words, all right, so it looks like
they look vaguely like dice. And and even if you're like,
I mean, I guess it's a cube, it's not a
perfect cube. Look at your poop and then look at
wombat poop and see which one's closer to cube like,
and you're gonna say, oh, yeah, definitely the wombat. And
then if you stop and say, well, wait a minute,

(03:57):
the wombat is is the only animal on the planet
that poops cubes. This is kind of weird and maybe
worth investigating. And for a long time, no one wanted
to kill a wombat to dissect it and figure out
what was going on in there, so we just basically
walked around and said it must have something of a
square shaped rectum. I guess that's it. That's gonna solve

(04:19):
the thing. Well, yeah, but I think the very first
thing that someone did was look, you know, on the
on the hind quarters and say, no, that as round
as round can be. Yeah, I think they were expecting
one of those Platos squeezed through shapes, you know what
I'm talking about. But they're like, it's it's a star,
it's an octagon, you know. It was just a normal

(04:42):
size um round bottom hole. Yeah, and anus. I think
a researcher even put his finger in there just to
make sure. He's like, no, it's round. Oh gosh, there
we go. I think we should. Oh yes, you're the
guy who said turns and now you're suddenly grossed out.
Well you say bottom hole. Then he said, put his
finger in right, put his finger in the momp at bottom.

(05:02):
After thirteen years, I never know where you're gonna fall. So, uh,
that's great. I like to keep you on your toes.
And here's another one for everybody out there. This is
gonna keep you on your toes. We're going to add
break all right. The first study was looking under that

(05:38):
tail and they said, nope, it's round and it's an anus.
It's not a Plato machine. The second test they did,
like you said, they didn't want to kill him. They
found one that was hit by a car at the
University of Tasmania and Dr Scott Carver said, you know
what I'm I'm treating these or I'm looking into reading

(06:00):
mange disease and wombats. Anyway, so let me dissect this thing.
Let me look at the intestines, and holy moly, they
have a couple of grooves in their intestines where they're
a little more elastic than the rest. And that was
in eighteen and I think a couple of years later
is when they did a further test, right, yeah, at

(06:22):
our own Georgia Tech down the street. Was that a tech? Yeah,
David Who or Hugh biomechanics researcher at Georgia Tech. UM
lad this the second American group UM into wombat intestines
and why wombat poop is square. They don't mention that

(06:42):
David Who and his UM team waited for a wombat
to get hit by a car like the Australian researchers.
It just says they dissected to wombats, So probably best
not to ask too many questions around that. Well. Also,
how did they get a wombat in Atlanta? Exactly? They
were just maybe they had them shipped in and then
they just kind of pushed them out towards seventy see waits,

(07:05):
you know, let nature take its course. Yeah, or they
just picked up the phone and called any Australian number
and some guy said, I'll get you two wombats. What's
your what's your address or whatever they call an address.
That's pretty great. Um. So regardless, they got their hands
on a couple of wombats, may have been alive, may not.
We're not quite sure exactly what happened there. But they

(07:26):
really focused on the intestines in that elastic part, and
they found that not only is there a region that's
more elastic, that's um less constricting in the intestines of
the wombats than other parts, they also found one part
that's stiffer than the rest, and that all of this
weirdness in the intestines takes place in about the last

(07:46):
sevent of the wombats intestines and that it's here finally
figured out that the square poop starts to take its shape. Yeah,
and it happens because I mean, I think, um, the
stiff portions like a stiff rubber band. Oh, basically, the
whole thing like a rubber band. The stiff portions are
like a stiff rubber band, which isn't a thing. I
hate to break it to David Doo and the softer

(08:08):
regions are more droopy and kind of hang down, so
it creates like this wave like action. And the whole
key to me seems like how slow these forty contractions
happen to get this poop out? It seems like it's
just a very slow process and just kind of molds
it into a little square or yep. I mean, we

(08:30):
have like a pretty long digestive tract, but the wombats
and testines are ten times longer than the wombat itself,
and it's digestion process takes about four times longer than
the humans. It gets every bit of moisture and water
out of it, every nutrient it can possibly get, so
it poops out these very dry, cubed poops. And it

(08:53):
does that because the digestive process takes so long. But
the other key to it to chuck is at the
contractions of moving the poop through the intestines um. In
basically every other animal on Earth, those contractions and the
movements are the same everywhere around the intestine. The wombat is,

(09:14):
as far as we know, the only animal that has
different sections that move differently at different times UM and
that's what produces the edges and the squares in the
shape of the square poop. They finally figured it out.
It's one of those things where it helps a lot
if you're a biomechanics researcher, because they they are not
the best at explaining things, so it's kind of hard

(09:35):
to get. It's one of the things that you just
have to say, Oh, the intestines moved differently than other intestines,
and it has the time to create these sides and shapes. Yeah.
I mean, it's almost like a perfect little square compression machine.
M you know that it's set up to be that way,
which sort of lends itself to the question like, well,
why is this happening? Then if it's this perfect little

(09:57):
machine making these uh, little square poops that frankly look
quite delicious and edible, um, because they're so dry, it
looks like a little candy treat or something. It's just
sunk in what you just said. What you just said,
wombat poops look delicious? Well they do. It looks like
a little chocolate confection to me. Uh. I mean, if

(10:22):
you put one on a bunch of them on a
plate at a party, I might actually mistake one, you know,
did you just make air quotes but when you said
a mistake? Jerk? All right? So uh it lends itself
to the question like, why is this happening? Why is
it making these perfect little cube poops? And who has

(10:45):
an idea that hey, maybe you know, these things poop
on rocks and tree logs and branches and stuff to
mark their area and obviously something square will sit better
and maybe evolutionarily speaking, that's just what happened over the years. Yeah,
And I mean his guess is as good as any.
He's the one who who dissected the wombats and found

(11:06):
the whole intestine thing. And actually, I mean it makes
a lot of sense. I haven't heard any rival explanations.
I should say. No, I mean he got a ignoble prize, right,
he definitely did. Um. And he's saying like, I'm a
biomechanics guy. They he published, by the way, the um
the article in the journal Soft Matter for real um,

(11:30):
And he's saying like, there's there's biomechanically speaking, we could
probably use how the wombats and testines work as some
sort of model or inspiration for shaping other things. But
really the most immediate practical application it has is that
um the dryer and square wombat poop is, the healthier

(11:51):
the wombat is, so we can be used as a
measurer standard um in for wombats and kept in captivity. Yeah.
So it's like I'm contributing. I don't just go I'm
not just a wanbat murderer, you know, I'm I'm contributing
to the greater good. They're just those two. Let's not
talk about them. Yeah, you just take a bite. You
got super dry that. That's a healthy wanbat, right, Yeah,

(12:14):
you pass it around the order tree any milk. By
the way, it's a little well, it must be pollen season.
So Chuck just laughed. There's a pregnant pause of awkward silence,
which means, everybody short. Stuff is that stuff you should know?

(12:35):
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