Here are some things you might not have known about poop:
1. Bird poop is white because birds can’t pee. Their kidneys work like ours do, but instead of producing urine, birds excrete a white paste which mixes with waste from the intestines unites and is excreted through the bird’s cloaca (yep, that's a multi-purpose hole). And, yes, by multi-purpose, I mean they even mate through it.
2. Eating poop has a name: coprophagy. Coprophagous insects consume and redigest the feces of large animals. The most famous feces-eating insect is the dung-beetle and the most ubiquitous is the fly. Rabbits, hamsters and other related species do not have a complex digestive system. Instead they extract more nutrition by giving their food a second pass through the gut. They produce pellets of partially digested food as well as produce normal droppings, which are not eaten. Young elephants, pandas, koalas, and hippos eat the feces of their mother to obtain the bacteria required to properly digest vegetation as they are born without these bacteria and would be unable to get any nutritional value from plants without them.
3. Cavemen were better equipped to chew and digest many plants and vegetables. They had larger molars and longer digestive tracts better at handling foods rich in indigestible cellulose, like, er, corn, for instance.
4. The word poop comes from the Middle English word poupen or popen, which used to be the root of the word we now call a fart. Clearly poop has onomatopoeic origins.
Need more? See Wikipedia!
No comments:
Post a Comment