Speaker 1: My welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick and Robert. I have just been out on
Speaker 1: vacation for a bit and I came back to find you, uh,
Speaker 1: absolutely rare and to go about coprophagia. That's right. Uh.
Speaker 1: The consumption of poopy, which I figured is is ideal.
Speaker 1: You should be listening to this episode during the week
Speaker 1: of American Thanksgiving. It's a time when people eat too much,
Speaker 1: and they eat a lot of gray and brownish foods
Speaker 1: that are too rich. They probably shouldn't be eating all
Speaker 1: of this stuff, but they do anyway. So it's a
Speaker 1: perfect time to talk about poop eating. Cram down the
Speaker 1: gullet with loving care, uh, in the presence of one's
Speaker 1: family and and in laws and all that. Now, before
Speaker 1: anybody turns us off, I do want to drive home
Speaker 1: that most of what we're gonna be talking about in
Speaker 1: this episode, UH relates to animals eating poop. As the
Speaker 1: title of the episode implies. At the very end, when
Speaker 1: when everyone's ready, we may talk a little bit about humans,
Speaker 1: but first we will deal with animals before we deal
Speaker 1: with the added complexities of human beings. Now, I'm sure
Speaker 1: the listeners out there are wondering the same thing I was.
Speaker 1: So I got back from vacation to find you super
Speaker 1: excited about animals eating poop, and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: what got you going on this, Robert? Why did you
Speaker 1: fling yourself headlong into a pit of coprophagia for the
Speaker 1: week of Thanksgiving? Well? I originally had the idea to
Speaker 1: do it after watching a David Attenborough narrated special titled
Speaker 1: Spy in the Pod, which is fun. It's a fun
Speaker 1: little show in which they have a remote control robot
Speaker 1: it's hanging out with elephants, and they briefly cover coprophagia
Speaker 1: practiced by elephant calves, which we'll get to in this episode.
Speaker 1: And I thought, well, that's interesting that a new spin
Speaker 1: on something that I'd largely just dismissed as being essentially
Speaker 1: an act of both of human defilement but also abnormal
Speaker 1: animal behavior. And I thought, well, this sounds like kind
Speaker 1: of a grim top kip topic, but certainly thanksgiving us
Speaker 1: the time to do it. Um. I think we've talked
Speaker 1: about what like poisonous foods and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of fits in with what we've done and
Speaker 1: were those aren't we Yeah, yeah, it's just running at
Speaker 1: least two and three Saturday. Yeah, but but anyway, anyway,
Speaker 1: and looking into the topic, then I realized, oh, this
Speaker 1: is a fascinating topic. And in the grand tradition of
Speaker 1: our episodes on cannibalism, h b clity, and necrophilia, I
Speaker 1: think that there's a there's an awesome challenge in tackling
Speaker 1: something like this, something that is generally considered very abnormal
Speaker 1: behavior for humans, and looking at it from just the
Speaker 1: the boiled down, no nonsense, uh animal side of things,
Speaker 1: like what is it? How does it make sense within
Speaker 1: the realm of animal biology and behavior, and then how
Speaker 1: might what might we apply that to the human scenario
Speaker 1: even Yeah, the sort of like brute chemical energy realities
Speaker 1: and and uh microbiological ecology of the world. In in
Speaker 1: that kind of context, poop eating begins to come into
Speaker 1: focus as a beautiful thing. Yeah, you know, as I
Speaker 1: discussed in our our Halloween two thousand and eighteen episode
Speaker 1: Horror Anthology, Volume one, UM, there's an episode of Night
Speaker 1: Gallery in which a character is tricked into believing himself
Speaker 1: cursed to an irreversible transformation into a human earthwork, and
Speaker 1: it's Leslie Nielsen with an iPad like shooting at walls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the a man with no fear who has eventually overcome
Speaker 1: with fear of becoming a worm. And I said that
Speaker 1: one of the reasons we find this concept so horrifying
Speaker 1: is that it reduces us to our alimentary track. We
Speaker 1: fear the worm at the heart of our being, and
Speaker 1: I think that we see that reflected in this episode
Speaker 1: as well, in thing that kind of reduces us to
Speaker 1: just our digestive system tends to have an inn aid
Speaker 1: horror to us because we're definitely going to be touching
Speaker 1: on the microbiome and all of this the importance of
Speaker 1: gut bacteria, which continuing research tells us just is far
Speaker 1: more important than than we ever imagined in the past.
Speaker 1: I mean, the worm dictates much of our health and
Speaker 1: even our mind. Yeah. We might get into this more
Speaker 1: as the episode goes on, but it is so fascinating
Speaker 1: that we have, uh, such a such a deep disgust
Speaker 1: and revulsion for the products of the human digestive system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it is just it's I mean, a certain amount
Speaker 1: of it is is learned for sure. But I think
Speaker 1: part of it too is that we're just we're not
Speaker 1: a coprophegic species, so we do not engage in this
Speaker 1: uh routinely or is a part of of normal behavior.
Speaker 1: I mean really, in the grand scheme of things, we're
Speaker 1: weird for not doing it. While we tend to look
Speaker 1: at it the other way. We we if we see
Speaker 1: an animal consuming its own poop or the poop of
Speaker 1: another creature, we think all of that is grotesque, how
Speaker 1: inhuman of this non human creature. Well, just think about
Speaker 1: the sensory difference, Like the world must just look and
Speaker 1: smell very different. If poop is delicious to you, or
Speaker 1: or even without even getting into idea of it's delicious
Speaker 1: or not, but if it is, under any circumstances nutritional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it really turns things on its head. But let's
Speaker 1: talk about some of the reasons, like the basic reasons
Speaker 1: that excrement consumption might be desirable for an animal before
Speaker 1: we get into species specific examples. Sure, well, one is
Speaker 1: obviously going to be that feces contain nutrients. I mean,
Speaker 1: by the time they come out of you, you have
Speaker 1: not gotten all the possible nutrition from it. That's right.
Speaker 1: Given digestive system does the best it can to break
Speaker 1: down the nutrients it needs from a meal, and then
Speaker 1: it passes on the rest. But sometimes it can't digest
Speaker 1: everything of value in there, and this may require the
Speaker 1: creature itself or another scavenger to give all or part
Speaker 1: of the excrement a second pass, maybe even a third pass,
Speaker 1: who knows. And also you have to consider the different
Speaker 1: species require different kinds of nutrients. So what might not
Speaker 1: be all that useful to you, or you might possess
Speaker 1: an excess in order to excrete in waste might be
Speaker 1: something that is very useful to a different organism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and two other points here too that certainly we'll get
Speaker 1: into examples of are that that first of all, you
Speaker 1: definitely think of you can think of that poop sometimes
Speaker 1: as a as a first draft. You know, not everything
Speaker 1: is finished, not everything has been been harvested. And then
Speaker 1: also think about what the human digestive system does. It
Speaker 1: takes the energy in the form of plant and or flesh,
Speaker 1: and it transforms that into a form that can be
Speaker 1: absorbed and digested, and it doesn't all take place like
Speaker 1: in your throat. You know, it's it's taking place at
Speaker 1: at at various points throughout a given creatures digestive system.
Speaker 1: Now that the next big reason, of course, relates to
Speaker 1: the microbiome. Yes, and this is huge. It's just sort
Speaker 1: of coming into focus, I think in in the past
Speaker 1: few decades, how enormously important the microbiome is. How your
Speaker 1: gut flora is. It determines a lot about how your
Speaker 1: body works and who you are, right and the gut
Speaker 1: floor is reflected not only in what's going on inside
Speaker 1: of you, but also in what is coming out of you.
Speaker 1: So you know, we we don't like to think of
Speaker 1: ourselves as a worm, obviously, and we don't like to
Speaker 1: think of ourselves as an organism at all. But if
Speaker 1: we do, we tend to think of ourselves as a
Speaker 1: single organism, splendid, perfect ape. I am an animal, I
Speaker 1: am one thing. Yeah, I'm the animal even But of
Speaker 1: course there's more to us than all of that. We're
Speaker 1: a multi cellular construction of maddening complexity, and we're literally
Speaker 1: host to an ecological community of commencial, synthiotic, and pathogenic
Speaker 1: micro organisms. We're learning more and more about the role
Speaker 1: that our microbiome plays every day. Certainly but it certainly
Speaker 1: plays an important role in digestion, and one microbiome can
Speaker 1: make certain diets more advantageous, and when out of balance,
Speaker 1: can lead to illness. So, for an extreme example, and
Speaker 1: one that I think ties in nicely with today's episode,
Speaker 1: just can consider uh, fecal microbiotic transplants f m t s.
Speaker 1: This was all over the news and you know, comedians
Speaker 1: had a big time with it. Sounds crazy, Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I feel like it certainly sounded crazy years ago, but
Speaker 1: less so today. I feel like at this point, everybody's
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh, yeah, that that that makes sense.
Speaker 1: They're gonna be situations where the microbiome needs to be restored,
Speaker 1: and to do so, a fecal transplant is sometimes the answer.
Speaker 1: But what's crazy is this, to a very large extent,
Speaker 1: is an example of the modern Is it basically the
Speaker 1: modern medical version of exactly what some animals are doing
Speaker 1: when they consume feces. We just have more elegant uh
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, modern delivery system in place. If
Speaker 1: you want a more palatable analogy, just think about all
Speaker 1: of the commercials for probiotic yogurt and stuff. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: this is the probiotic yogurt. Of the animal world. They
Speaker 1: can't go and uh and and and buy something at
Speaker 1: their local grocery store. Uh. They have a more old
Speaker 1: fashioned and effective means of taking care of the scenario. Now,
Speaker 1: these cases we've been talking about, our cases where it's
Speaker 1: clearly part of an animal's natural life cycle to consume
Speaker 1: feces to get something that it needs, whether that is
Speaker 1: living microbes or some kind of nutrients. But there are
Speaker 1: also probably cases where coprophagia is a sign that something
Speaker 1: is wrong, right, I mean, animals and captivity may engage
Speaker 1: in coprophagia. Puppy male dogs, for instance, can learn to
Speaker 1: confuse dog food with feces due to the horrid conditions
Speaker 1: in which they are sometimes raised. Adult elephants may engage
Speaker 1: in it due to captivity issues, and certainly, as we
Speaker 1: may touch on at the very end of the episode,
Speaker 1: humans may engage in such behavior due to dementia. But again,
Speaker 1: human coprophagia is is very rare with the animals. I
Speaker 1: feel like, once once we take into account the cases
Speaker 1: where it makes sense and is a part of their
Speaker 1: natural behavior, even the unnatural cases make a little bit
Speaker 1: more sense, you know, because with the human if a
Speaker 1: human consumes of feces. It is a human doing something
Speaker 1: that does not make sense within uh at any other
Speaker 1: point in humans life, whereas a dog a puppy, say,
Speaker 1: eating feces is is doing something perhaps out of place
Speaker 1: or out of in a frequency that doesn't sit well
Speaker 1: with their natural behavior, but is not unheard of in
Speaker 1: their natural behavior. Well, maybe we should talk about the
Speaker 1: idea of coprophasia as a natural behavior of dogs, because
Speaker 1: I so I can't speak directly to coprophasia, but I
Speaker 1: go out walking my dog and it is clear to me,
Speaker 1: based on the directions that the dog pulls, that feces
Speaker 1: are incredibly interesting to him. He's very interested in getting
Speaker 1: up close to them. I've never let him linger there
Speaker 1: with enough time to see what he would do if
Speaker 1: the smelling were allowed to evolve into munching. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that would happen, but I've often suspected now
Speaker 1: there could be other stuff going on there. For one thing,
Speaker 1: I think feces probably a lot of these feces are
Speaker 1: dog feces, and they probably contain a lot of interesting
Speaker 1: sensory information smell wise, like he can learn about the
Speaker 1: other dogs in the area by smelling the poop, I
Speaker 1: would assume, I mean probably just food interest. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean it's worth remembering that dogs live in an entirely
Speaker 1: different sense world in regard to smell. Yeah. But but
Speaker 1: I also do wonder like, Okay, if I wasn't there
Speaker 1: to pull him away, to gently drag him back on
Speaker 1: the leash, would he eat these feces? Well? I certainly
Speaker 1: no other dog owners who have to deal with, say
Speaker 1: the dog trying to get into get at the cat litter, Yes,
Speaker 1: to eat cat feces, yes, for example, And we're we're
Speaker 1: about to touch on that as well. Uh. I feel
Speaker 1: like this is probably the example of coprophasia that that
Speaker 1: our listeners are most well acquainted with um because dogs
Speaker 1: are popular pets and they do engage in this kind
Speaker 1: of behavior from time to time. And I mentioned it
Speaker 1: can be quite disruptive of the sort of anthropomorphizing we
Speaker 1: often do with our pets. Right, we teach them like
Speaker 1: we treat them like little fur babies, and if the names, yeah,
Speaker 1: and if and even the food we pick out the
Speaker 1: artificial uh, I mean the the prepackaged of food that
Speaker 1: we purchase for our animals. I mean those are foods
Speaker 1: that are marketed to appeal to both dogs but also
Speaker 1: to humans, where the humans are like, yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that I would eat if I were
Speaker 1: a dog. And so the idea then of of of
Speaker 1: consuming cat feces is generally kind of repugnant, and we
Speaker 1: have to I'm I'm I'm guessing there probably comes a
Speaker 1: point in any kind of like dog ownership. I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel like there's certainly that point in cat ownership
Speaker 1: to where you you really have to to remind yourself, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is an animal, and it's and it's living in
Speaker 1: a strange environment by hanging out in my house all
Speaker 1: or most of the time. But so when coprophigia occurs
Speaker 1: in dogs, I guess there are a couple of questions
Speaker 1: we could ask. First is how common is it? And
Speaker 1: second is why are they doing that? So, first of all,
Speaker 1: it is a minority of dogs that eat poop, but
Speaker 1: not a tiny minority. Aeen study in the journal Veterinary
Speaker 1: Medicine and Science by Heart at All used a large
Speaker 1: survey of dog owners to look at specifically that the
Speaker 1: question was about dogs eating dog feces. This study is
Speaker 1: not about dogs just eating poop in general. Maybe other animals,
Speaker 1: and it found the following. About seventy seven percent of
Speaker 1: dog owners had never seen their dog eating poop, about
Speaker 1: twenty three percent had seen their dog eating poop at
Speaker 1: least once, and about sixteen percent had seen their dog
Speaker 1: eating poops six or more times, so about a quarter
Speaker 1: try it at least once within view of a human.
Speaker 1: Roughly one in six dogs seem to eat poop a lot,
Speaker 1: and the lead author on that study was a veterinarian
Speaker 1: named Benjamin Hart, who directs the Center for Animal Behavior
Speaker 1: You See, Davis. One thing you might notice if you
Speaker 1: google like why is my dog eating poop? Is you'll
Speaker 1: get websites of self proclaimed dog experts of all kinds offering, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, many different answers, and speaking to Karen Bruillard
Speaker 1: in an article for The Washington Post, Heart said that
Speaker 1: the reason you get all these different answers is that
Speaker 1: nobody knows for sure why dogs eat poop, and they're
Speaker 1: basically all just guessing. Fortunately, Heart says that this behavior
Speaker 1: is gross as it might seem, is not usually dangerous
Speaker 1: to the dog's health. But does Heart have an answer
Speaker 1: about why dogs do it in the first place. Well,
Speaker 1: not a definitive one, but the authors of the twenty
Speaker 1: eight team paper do have a hypothesis and it goes
Speaker 1: something like this, So modern dogs are descended from some
Speaker 1: ancestral variety of wolf, and wolves don't like poop within
Speaker 1: their own den. They they like to go out somewhere
Speaker 1: away from the den to do their stuff. And this
Speaker 1: is probably an evolved defensive behavior because the feces of
Speaker 1: wild wolves often contain the eggs of intestinal parasites like
Speaker 1: hookworms or pinworms or cosidia, and there there could be
Speaker 1: genes probably selecting for behaviors that would help prevent your
Speaker 1: brothers and sisters and other close relatives in the pack
Speaker 1: from catching your intestinal parasites. However, maybe sometimes you get
Speaker 1: a sick wolf, a sick wolf that's in the pack
Speaker 1: and is not able to leave the den in order
Speaker 1: to poop. In that case, it would actually make sense
Speaker 1: to eat poop within the den as quickly as possible,
Speaker 1: since it usually takes a couple of days for parasite
Speaker 1: eggs in poop to hatch and become dangerous. So rather
Speaker 1: than let the poop in the den just sit there
Speaker 1: for a couple of days and become a potential bio hazard.
Speaker 1: There could be a selection pressure favoring an impulse in
Speaker 1: wolves and their dog descendants to immediately eat fresh poop
Speaker 1: within the den before it goes over the edge and
Speaker 1: becomes a risk. And this hypothesis is actually consistent with
Speaker 1: another thing that researchers have found about dog coprophagia, which
Speaker 1: was that in dogs who eat who do eat poop,
Speaker 1: more than eight percent prefer poop that is fresh, no
Speaker 1: more than two days old, you know. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: James Serpel, a professor of veterinary medicine at U PEN,
Speaker 1: was also quoted in that post piece, and Sir Pell
Speaker 1: says he finds that the din cleaning hypothesis for coprophagia,
Speaker 1: that that could be plausible. That might be the case,
Speaker 1: But Sirple also points out that poop eating dogs tended
Speaker 1: more often to be rated by their owners as generally
Speaker 1: greedy eaters. And that's a quote greedy eaters. So we
Speaker 1: can't rule out the possibility that the cause is simply
Speaker 1: dogs with a strong scavenging instinct and some large and
Speaker 1: indiscriminate appetites looking for a bit of extra nutrition. Well,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick rake and then when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will explore coprophagia among elephants. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, So Robert, it's time to talk
Speaker 1: about elephant coprophagia. So obviously, there's nothing cuter than an
Speaker 1: elephant calf than a baby elephant. You know. It's just like,
Speaker 1: if someone shows me a YouTube video of a baby
Speaker 1: elephant doing pretty much anything, I'm gonna watch it. I
Speaker 1: don't know, what about a screeching adult possum, Well, that's
Speaker 1: fun too. I also really like it when skunks stand
Speaker 1: on their their fore legs and wave their their hinders
Speaker 1: in the air. I'm pretty much game for any animal video.
Speaker 1: But there's something about an elephant calf, you know, it's
Speaker 1: just so adorable. I think it has something to do
Speaker 1: with the the large head with the kind of wispy hair,
Speaker 1: do you know what I'm talking about? The triggers. I
Speaker 1: think some of the baby schema instinct like that. The
Speaker 1: part of the idea of the baby scheme as that
Speaker 1: we are we are triggered with, uh you know, like
Speaker 1: caregiving instincts when we see a creature with a large
Speaker 1: forehead and apparently large brain case because it looks kind
Speaker 1: of like the proportions of a human baby and baby elephants.
Speaker 1: They strike me as being kind of like that, right,
Speaker 1: And then they start eating a little poop, and we're
Speaker 1: not sure where we're how we're supposed to feel about
Speaker 1: the whole situation. And this is in the wild, mind you,
Speaker 1: this is observed in the wild. This is not just
Speaker 1: a zoo thing or anything. Um, So it leads us
Speaker 1: to ask, you know, what purpose could this serf? Well,
Speaker 1: the poop contains vital bacteria for breaking down plant cellulus,
Speaker 1: and by consuming some of its mom's dung, an elephant
Speaker 1: calf essentially gets that microbiome boost towards the consumption of food.
Speaker 1: So it's it's vital in them making that leap from
Speaker 1: just just sustaining themselves on their mother's milk to actually
Speaker 1: eating as an adult or semi adult elephant. And then
Speaker 1: they're also going to get some nourishment out of the
Speaker 1: deal as well as roughly two thirds of an elephant's
Speaker 1: diet uh ends up coming out the other end undigested.
Speaker 1: I guess this would be a diet heavy and rough
Speaker 1: plant matter. Oh, yeah, you know it. So they're they're
Speaker 1: eating elephants obviously eat a ton they're eating a lot
Speaker 1: of plant matter, but even their impressive anatomy is only
Speaker 1: able to absorb so much of it. By the way,
Speaker 1: speaking of elephant poop, uh, it's pretty incredible as well
Speaker 1: due to its a seed distribution. Powers. This was kind
Speaker 1: of a tangent I happened upon in my research. You know,
Speaker 1: we often forget this about this when we're considering the
Speaker 1: ecological impact of elephants and h and also you know
Speaker 1: some of the ramvoications of their dwindling numbers. But just
Speaker 1: consider the Asian elephant, which has lost its habitat and
Speaker 1: ninety percent of its population over the last century. Um.
Speaker 1: And these stats come from on the Importance of Elephant
Speaker 1: Poop by Sarah Zelinsky, published in Science News. She points
Speaker 1: to a two thousand fifteen ecology publication by a Secca
Speaker 1: at all uh that points to three plant species in
Speaker 1: particular that have evolved to benefit from elephant seed distribution,
Speaker 1: including the so called elephant apple apple, which I was
Speaker 1: not familiar with. Um. Most animals can't actually eat the
Speaker 1: elephant apple because it's just so tough, and as with
Speaker 1: wild guava, which is another example of this, it's far
Speaker 1: more likely to germinate if it passes through an elephant
Speaker 1: rather than say a cow or a buffalo. So key.
Speaker 1: Key here, of course is the fact that the seed
Speaker 1: itself has to be undigested in order to actually germinate
Speaker 1: and grow new plants. Yeah, and there of course a
Speaker 1: number of plants that depend on distribution methods like this,
Speaker 1: like the an animal eats the fruit and then poops
Speaker 1: the seeds out somewhere, often helping transport the seeds somewhere
Speaker 1: along the way. Yeah, I feel like this is something
Speaker 1: this kind of comes back to how humans perceive poop.
Speaker 1: We we tend to think again with that that sort
Speaker 1: of worm analogy. On one end of the worm is food,
Speaker 1: delicious food, and on the other end is just poop,
Speaker 1: just utter utter law. It's heaven and hell. You know
Speaker 1: it's good and evil. But really, you're and most animals
Speaker 1: would be able to attest to this, have the gift
Speaker 1: of reason and language that the poop still has a
Speaker 1: lot of good in it. It's not just this, uh,
Speaker 1: this transformation from like you know, a hundred zero, it's
Speaker 1: not heaven in hell. It's more like dinner and leftovers.
Speaker 1: And you might find, in fact that the leftovers have
Speaker 1: already been conveniently cut up into pieces for you exactly.
Speaker 1: I should also point out that this has been a
Speaker 1: practice among elephants and elephant can for quite some time. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was a forty two thousand year old baby female
Speaker 1: mammoth double lube and she was found to have adult
Speaker 1: mammoth poop in her digestive system. This seems to be
Speaker 1: just a part of how you first of all, wean
Speaker 1: and then also prepare the the the microbiota of the
Speaker 1: young elephant calf. Now speaking of similar large mammals with
Speaker 1: also very cute babies, I was reading just a little
Speaker 1: bit about the importance in the the freshwater food chain
Speaker 1: of some rivers of hippo poop. You know, hippo has
Speaker 1: to do a similar thing. They come up out of
Speaker 1: the water to eat a whole bunch of you know,
Speaker 1: rough plant matter, and then they retreat back into the
Speaker 1: water to just poop it all out, poop it all
Speaker 1: out straight into the water. Uh. And this this ends
Speaker 1: up forming an important nutrition source for fish and other
Speaker 1: organisms downstream. But of course, too much hippo poop can
Speaker 1: lead to problems like eutrophication, where there's too many nutrients
Speaker 1: in the water. I imagined. This is one of one
Speaker 1: of the many challenges of keeping hippos in an artificial
Speaker 1: environment is having to clean up water all the time. Oh,
Speaker 1: I was actually reading something about this. Uh, I wish
Speaker 1: I could remember the details. But in regards to uh,
Speaker 1: Pablo Escobar's hippos, yes, his his hippos which are sweat
Speaker 1: supposedly still running amok something like that. Yeah. Um, I
Speaker 1: also remember I've done some hippo poop research in the past. Um,
Speaker 1: actually a fair amount of, I guess just hippo aanous research,
Speaker 1: because you've got like a special variety of leech that
Speaker 1: is only attracted to the hippoanus. They also do that
Speaker 1: great thing with their tails, the spinning. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: whirling tail poopy go around. Yeah, it's like a sprinkler
Speaker 1: system for fresh hippo feces. Well, now that we have
Speaker 1: that image in your head, let's turn to what I
Speaker 1: think might be the most impressive variety of coprophagic organisms.
Speaker 1: This would be the order Lego Morpha, or the Lego morphs.
Speaker 1: Bunny rabbits, yeah, rabbits, hairs pike has presumably the easter
Speaker 1: bunny as well. I don't know, I think I warned
Speaker 1: people when we mentioned this episode was coming up that
Speaker 1: they would be treated to an utter ruination of the
Speaker 1: cuteness of bunnies. But maybe instead, if you're open minded enough,
Speaker 1: this will even expand your bunny cuteness appreciation and higher
Speaker 1: dimensions of consciousness. I think I'm more in that that
Speaker 1: that area. Like when I first started looking into it,
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, maybe this is a little gross,
Speaker 1: but no, like, no, this is amazing. Like I'm not
Speaker 1: sure I had any reason to find wonderment in bunnies
Speaker 1: and rabbits before, you know, accepted if it's some sort
Speaker 1: of cool predation method by something that eats them. But no, this,
Speaker 1: this is amazing what we're going to talk about here,
Speaker 1: and it forces you to rethink not only rabbits, but
Speaker 1: I think digestion itself. Okay, so what does normal rabbit
Speaker 1: feeding look like? What are they eating? What do they do? Oh? Well,
Speaker 1: you know they're eating carrots the cartoons, if they've taught
Speaker 1: me correctly, you know they're they're eating plants. They're in
Speaker 1: a diet with a lot of a lot of greens
Speaker 1: and uh and you know the gardens of English gardeners
Speaker 1: when they can get in there though. Funny side fact,
Speaker 1: I was actually just reading a paper that mentioned some
Speaker 1: opportunistic carnivory of rabbits, not of rabbits by rabbits. Oh,
Speaker 1: that would make sense given everything we've learned about squirrels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this was an isolated case. It's not like
Speaker 1: this is super common, but it had at least been observed. Well,
Speaker 1: they've also been observed plenty of times engaging in coprophagia,
Speaker 1: and it's actually a clever way by which they overcome
Speaker 1: some of the shortcomings of their digestive systems. So their
Speaker 1: hind gut fermenters, and what does that mean. What means
Speaker 1: that the bacterial fermentation that breaks down much of the
Speaker 1: plant matter they consume, it takes place in the hind gut.
Speaker 1: In rabbits, this is in the secum and and so yeah,
Speaker 1: you're having all of this, like vital breakdown of the
Speaker 1: material taking place rather late in the process. And yet
Speaker 1: most of the nutrient absorption takes place in the stomach
Speaker 1: and the small intestines, which is of course earlier in
Speaker 1: the process. So you have this weird situation where there's
Speaker 1: so much of the nutrients that they need are not
Speaker 1: really coming online until it's basically poop ready for depositings.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like one of those movies where
Speaker 1: the plot doesn't make sense until everything comes together right
Speaker 1: at the end. Kind of you kind of need to
Speaker 1: see it again after you've seen it to put everything
Speaker 1: together exactly. It's also worth noting that we're dealing with
Speaker 1: creatures that are small, gutted and uh and have very
Speaker 1: high metabolisms, which also plays into the scenario. So what's
Speaker 1: the what's the rabbit to do? Why you simply run
Speaker 1: it all through again you watch the movie again. Uh
Speaker 1: and but but it's more elegant than that. It's it's
Speaker 1: more amazing than simply okay, well they're they're poops, still
Speaker 1: have a lot of nutrients, so they eat their poop again.
Speaker 1: They have two types of poop WHOA, so they have
Speaker 1: poop toggling. Essentially, they produce what is called a sika
Speaker 1: trope or night feces or night poops, if you will.
Speaker 1: While normal daytime feces is brown and hard, the night
Speaker 1: poops are dark, soft and coated in mucus, and these
Speaker 1: they eat up right away. Generally, this has taking place,
Speaker 1: I understand, like basically the early more the early hours
Speaker 1: of the morning, uh hand, or you know, the the
Speaker 1: very latest portion of the night. However you want to
Speaker 1: slice it, thus night poops, and they eats up up
Speaker 1: so swiftly that I'm to understand that many pet owners
Speaker 1: don't even know what's happening. Uh, And in doing this
Speaker 1: they absorb those vital nutrients on the second pass. In fact,
Speaker 1: if a rabbit doesn't eat its night nightpoops, that means
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with it. So according to help Doc,
Speaker 1: my rabbit is not engaging in coprophagia exactly. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's basically the reversal we see, the reversal of human
Speaker 1: expectations for coprophasia. According to the Cornell veterinarian paper Coprophasia
Speaker 1: and Animals, a review by Slave and Brand, the night
Speaker 1: poops are quote swallowed like pills, and in the case
Speaker 1: of the pika for instance, uh, the night poops are
Speaker 1: essentially a mix of partially digested moss and gut bacteria.
Speaker 1: And it's actually six times more nutritious than the moss itself.
Speaker 1: So it's almost like cooking increases the nutritional profile of food. Well,
Speaker 1: we've talked about it fro from the human perspective, cooking
Speaker 1: is the externalization of digestion. It's technological digestion. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is cooking via the pike a gut.
Speaker 1: They also point out that young rabbits begin eating their
Speaker 1: mother's night poops before moving onto the consumption of their own.
Speaker 1: So again we see this kind of weaning process similar
Speaker 1: to what we saw in elephants. And uh. This also
Speaker 1: supply supplies nitrogen, protein, sulfur, and vitamins, and up to
Speaker 1: on consumption of night poop may be necessary for these
Speaker 1: creatures to intake adequate levels um um of these substances. Okay,
Speaker 1: so now that we have expanded your mind about cute bunnies,
Speaker 1: I assume it will be less of a leap for
Speaker 1: people to find out that rats consume feces. Right. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like this should be a no brainer, like
Speaker 1: it really, I think people are going to be surprised
Speaker 1: that they don't eat as much poop as as rabbits do.
Speaker 1: But a single rat consumes a varying amount of its
Speaker 1: own dung. We're talking between five and fifty percent of
Speaker 1: its own fecal output. And as with rabbits, we see
Speaker 1: some key nutrients in here made absorbable via that first
Speaker 1: round of digestion, and it's a way for them to
Speaker 1: hit target absorption levels prevent them from eating their own poop.
Speaker 1: And young rats experience a depression and growth rate of
Speaker 1: about fifteen and it's especially useful as a way for
Speaker 1: them to make up for shortfalls in their natural dietary nutrients.
Speaker 1: So whereas human adults tell human children like don't drink coffee,
Speaker 1: that will stunt your growth, your adult rats would tell
Speaker 1: their their rat pups, don't not eat your poop, that
Speaker 1: will stunt your growth. Exactly. It's also been observed to
Speaker 1: boost the rats and microbiotic performance. And in fact, thiamine
Speaker 1: is produced in the rats intestinal tract and is not absorbed.
Speaker 1: They have to eat it then to pick it up.
Speaker 1: So if rats are are permitted from eating their own feces,
Speaker 1: such as with a laboratory via laboratory tail cup, you'll
Speaker 1: have to add vitamin K to their diets to make
Speaker 1: up for it. And similarly, they require B complex if
Speaker 1: not allowed to ingest their own feces. And with rats,
Speaker 1: just as we saw with with with rabbits, it begins
Speaker 1: with the young eating the mother's feces with the pheromonal
Speaker 1: encouragement of the practice. Maternal rat feces contains high levels
Speaker 1: of the oxycolic acid that's lacking and pre weened weaning rats,
Speaker 1: and this is a steroid that promotes immune development in
Speaker 1: the intestinal tract. So part of what you're saying is
Speaker 1: that when you find rat poop in the back of
Speaker 1: a kitchen cabinet or something, there actually probably was originally
Speaker 1: more rat poop there and they just they took some
Speaker 1: of it along with them. I'm not sure on that,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not sure when they're I don't think
Speaker 1: it was really reflected in this main uh Suave and
Speaker 1: Brand paper, like when they're eating the poop, if this
Speaker 1: is only occurring like mostly close to home, or if
Speaker 1: it's going to occur in your cabinet potentially. Now, another
Speaker 1: animal that is famous for wallowing in its own filth,
Speaker 1: of course, is yield poor sign that's right, uh, the pig.
Speaker 1: And this is another animal where people would be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that that makes sense. A pick would probably eat
Speaker 1: its own poop. Um adult pig poop is rich in iron,
Speaker 1: and piglets will, according to Suave and Brand, consume about
Speaker 1: twenty grams of maternal feces per day, and this plays
Speaker 1: a role in preventing iron deficiency anemia in the piglets.
Speaker 1: Now beyond the realm of pigs, it's also been seen
Speaker 1: in non human primates, with B twelve and fatty acids
Speaker 1: coming into play for some monkeys, but it does not
Speaker 1: serve as a major source of nutrients in non human primates.
Speaker 1: Will come back to non human primates in a bit.
Speaker 1: In horses, however, between the second and fifth week after birth,
Speaker 1: a full will apparently eat part of the mother's feces,
Speaker 1: and it also occurs in mature horses that have low
Speaker 1: protein diets. I'd like to just read a quote from
Speaker 1: that Suave and Brand paper. Actually they say quote. Coprophagia
Speaker 1: is essential for some species of animals, providing nutrients which
Speaker 1: contribute to growth, development, and maturation of the animals. The
Speaker 1: practice must be considered in the interpretation of comparative investigations
Speaker 1: done with coprophagous and non cooperate agus animals. The impact
Speaker 1: of coprophasia in laboratory studies using rodents and rabbits could
Speaker 1: seriously influence test results, especially in the fields of nutrition, microbiology, pharmacology,
Speaker 1: and toxicology. So what they're saying is science needs to
Speaker 1: take way more poop eating into account. Basically, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is something I still reflected in some other papers
Speaker 1: I looked at where they said, there's just there hasn't
Speaker 1: been enough research on some species and they're they're poop eating.
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly rabbits have received a lot of attention,
Speaker 1: but but this is a this is an interesting point
Speaker 1: about especially UH lab mice and rats that we're studying
Speaker 1: to understand so many things about about human physiology. Now
Speaker 1: while we're on the subject of animals that are probably
Speaker 1: less surprising to find out that they that they engage
Speaker 1: in some poop eating. Obviously, insects and invertebrates of various
Speaker 1: kinds are going to figure big into this kind of picture.
Speaker 1: In fact, I remember I had a biology teacher ones
Speaker 1: who was talking about his expeditions to the jungles of
Speaker 1: South America, and he talked about how you know, in
Speaker 1: the morning, if you if you were out in the rainforest,
Speaker 1: and you would you would venture out away from the
Speaker 1: camp to release a large bowel movement. After the coffee hour, UH,
Speaker 1: you could basically sit there and watch it become a
Speaker 1: chemical beacon for invertebrate forest life, where we're slowly thinking
Speaker 1: all these insects and different kinds of species would just
Speaker 1: descend on it from all around. And uh, that image
Speaker 1: is stuck with me ever since I would kind of
Speaker 1: like to see that. Yeah, it's far It's a far
Speaker 1: different scenario in our urban environment, where if you go
Speaker 1: out and poop on the sidewalk in the morning, you
Speaker 1: may attract attention. But but but may I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm joking, But I mean it's not like we don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of insect life in the city. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess we do. Yeah, I mean you will certainly
Speaker 1: see flies on poop. I mean it's a cliche for
Speaker 1: a reason. Now. One of the most impressie consumers of
Speaker 1: of poop in the insect world is, of course, the
Speaker 1: dung beetle. These are amazing animals they are and um,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I think we tend to be cool with
Speaker 1: the dung beetle. I mean, the dung beetle is kind
Speaker 1: of funny because of what it's doing, especially if you're
Speaker 1: watching a variety of dung beetle that rolls the poop away.
Speaker 1: How come dung beetles don't seem as gross to us
Speaker 1: as the flies and maggots that land on poop. I
Speaker 1: think part of it is that they're generally we're generally
Speaker 1: when we're watching videos of it, we're watching dung beetles
Speaker 1: that are rolling away like animal poop, and yeah, animal poop,
Speaker 1: and specifically herbivore poop, which tends to be far nicer poop. Like, really,
Speaker 1: if you have to, if I had to deal with
Speaker 1: a bunch of poop, like just to scoop it, you know,
Speaker 1: give me, give me horsepoop the day of the week,
Speaker 1: it looks more like mud with some hay in it, right,
Speaker 1: And basically it is. I mean, just think back to
Speaker 1: the elephant poop example and all the all the stuff
Speaker 1: that is still in there unabsorbed. But we have a
Speaker 1: lot of different types of dung beetles. I've seen the number.
Speaker 1: I've seen it as low as five thousand, but I've
Speaker 1: also seen it sited is like eight thousand different species
Speaker 1: of dung beetles, and they can be found on every
Speaker 1: continent except Antarctica. They thrive in numerous environments as well,
Speaker 1: not just grasslands. So I feel like sometimes we have
Speaker 1: a false idea of dung beetles just based on seeing
Speaker 1: like one or two segments in a nature documentary, and
Speaker 1: they given their name implies they subsist almost exclusively on
Speaker 1: the extrement of other organisms, although they can sometimes feast
Speaker 1: on carrion leaf, litter, mushrooms, and decaying fruit. Some of
Speaker 1: the species famously roll balls of dung away from the pile.
Speaker 1: Everybody's seen this, like the the image of them pushing
Speaker 1: it like a boulder, like somebody in tartar Us. You know,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because that's one of the things they make.
Speaker 1: They make a bee line, they make a straight line,
Speaker 1: and they use some incredible strength and also some some
Speaker 1: fairly incredible navigation U techniques to to really pull this off,
Speaker 1: because they have to be fast. A dung, as we've discussed,
Speaker 1: loses its nutritional punch rather quickly. Uh So it has
Speaker 1: to the ones that actually roll it away. They have
Speaker 1: to roll it away in a straight line, get it
Speaker 1: somewhere where they can deal with it, and they might
Speaker 1: have to deal with competing dung beetles on the way.
Speaker 1: Now you might not know the answer to this, but
Speaker 1: why is it that dung loses its nutritional value over time?
Speaker 1: Is it? Uh? Is it the microbes in it that
Speaker 1: are consuming a lot of the nutrients. I think that
Speaker 1: is the case. Yeah, I mean, and it's almost like
Speaker 1: the dung is alive and dying, you know, and it
Speaker 1: has to be uh, it has to be dealt with
Speaker 1: whether quickly. Um. Now, I mentioned that you know varieties
Speaker 1: that roll, they're dung. While rollers are certainly the most famous,
Speaker 1: there are also tunnelers, so they tunneled down into the poop.
Speaker 1: And then there are dwellers that dwell atop the poop. Um.
Speaker 1: So these are the things that the mountain. Yeah, basically
Speaker 1: there's king of the mountain, there's king under the mountain,
Speaker 1: and then there's he who rolls poop away from the mountain. Uh.
Speaker 1: And those are the three categories the at of poop. Now,
Speaker 1: according to Believe it's Dr John M. Capinera. A one
Speaker 1: point five kilogram or three point three pound load of
Speaker 1: elephant dung was observed to attract sixteen thousand dung beetles
Speaker 1: who eight buried and rolled it away in less than
Speaker 1: two hours. Less than two hours. That's that's incredible, and
Speaker 1: that's that's difficult to imagine. But you know, if you
Speaker 1: have an entire swarm of dung beetles. I almost don't
Speaker 1: believe that two hours all by insects. Well, well, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll check that in qua and make sure that holds true. No,
Speaker 1: I'm sure I believe it. I believe it all right. Well,
Speaker 1: according to the San Diego Zoo, the average domestic cow
Speaker 1: drops dung like ten to twelve times per day, and
Speaker 1: each pat of poop can produce up to three thousand
Speaker 1: flies within two weeks. In some parts of Texas, dune
Speaker 1: beetles bury about eighty percent of cattle dunge. So just
Speaker 1: imagine what life would be like without dung beetles around
Speaker 1: to to con whom the poop Robert, That sounds like
Speaker 1: a messy planet it would be. But thank thank God
Speaker 1: for the dung beetles. All right, let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break and when we come back, we will discuss picture
Speaker 1: plants than alright, we're back this time with a non
Speaker 1: animal feces consumer. Well, it's much less surprising, I guess,
Speaker 1: than animals eating poop to hear of plants benefiting from poop,
Speaker 1: because obviously, you know, you could think about fertilizer and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. They're there are nutrients in poop that
Speaker 1: can sink into the soil and nourish the roots of
Speaker 1: a tree or something like that. But I want to
Speaker 1: talk about a more direct kind of fecal gobbling by plants,
Speaker 1: and that would be, of course, the case of picture plants.
Speaker 1: Now we've discussed picture plants on the show before. These
Speaker 1: are generally carnivorous plants with these picture cup shaped leaves
Speaker 1: that form a pit trap. And the general predation strategy
Speaker 1: of these carnivorous plants goes like this. So you have
Speaker 1: a delicious smelling chemical lure, some kind of actor or
Speaker 1: something to attract insects to your picture, and then the
Speaker 1: insects land and try to feed, or at least try
Speaker 1: to investigate, but the edges of the picture slippery, and
Speaker 1: then the insect falls into a pool of liquid down
Speaker 1: inside the cupped leaf. Now, once in the liquid, the
Speaker 1: insect dies, and then the body is digested by enzymes
Speaker 1: down in the pit, and the plant of course feeds. Now.
Speaker 1: This is often especially important because the picture plant needs
Speaker 1: those arthur pod bodies is a source of nitrogen, which
Speaker 1: is a crucial nutrient for them, and which is often
Speaker 1: scarce in the kinds of soil where the picture plants
Speaker 1: tend to grow, which can be like swampy soil or
Speaker 1: like heath soil, just not very nitrogen rich. But a
Speaker 1: curious thing has happened to some picture plants. Some seem
Speaker 1: to have evolved a taste for poop. And now I
Speaker 1: was reading a great piece in National Geographic by Ed Young,
Speaker 1: one of our favorite science writers, about the picture plant
Speaker 1: Nepenthes hymnslayan a. And so there were some researchers that
Speaker 1: Ed was talking about. One was Omar Graph from the
Speaker 1: University of Brunei, Jerusalem, and he noticed something odd about
Speaker 1: this species of plant to pen these Hymns layana. It
Speaker 1: was sort of low on fluid compared to other picture plants,
Speaker 1: and it also didn't release obvious chemical attractants for insects,
Speaker 1: and it tended to have about seven times fewer insects
Speaker 1: than the pictures of other species. Now, instead of insects
Speaker 1: in the pictures, there were often bats. There were a
Speaker 1: type of bat known as Hardwick's wooly bat or Cravoula hardwicki, roosting,
Speaker 1: sometimes roosting as families inside the plants. And so Graph
Speaker 1: work together with Caroline and Michael Schooner from the University
Speaker 1: of Greifswald to investigate the apparent mutualism between bats and
Speaker 1: picture plants. Obviously there's some kind of relationship going on here.
Speaker 1: What is it. You've got big pictures that bats can
Speaker 1: fit inside, very little fluid, very few insects. But of
Speaker 1: course the pictures were full of you guess it, poop
Speaker 1: bat feces, also known as guano, which is incidentally a
Speaker 1: great source of nitrogen. Now, the researchers found that the
Speaker 1: plants were getting so much nitrogen from the guano that
Speaker 1: they didn't need to kill nearly as many insects. So
Speaker 1: here's the question, how did the pictures attract the bats?
Speaker 1: Because bats navigate mostly by echolocation, they determined shapes in
Speaker 1: their surroundings by making sounds and then listening for those
Speaker 1: sounds to bounce back off the objects in the environment,
Speaker 1: forming a three D sonic map. And there are similar
Speaker 1: shaped other species of picture plants in the forest, and
Speaker 1: there's just a lot of stuff in the forest to
Speaker 1: sort of like muck up your view. So how did
Speaker 1: the himsleana plants attract the bats? The researchers mentioned before
Speaker 1: teamed up with Ralph Simon of the University of Erlangen, Nuremberg,
Speaker 1: who helped out by bringing along a robotic bath head
Speaker 1: and so ed Wrights quote. The team found that the
Speaker 1: back wall of in salayan a, the bit that connects
Speaker 1: its lid to its main chamber, is unusually wide, elongated,
Speaker 1: and curved. It's like a parabolic dish. It strongly reflects
Speaker 1: incoming ultrasound in the direction it came from and over
Speaker 1: a large area. Other picture plants that live in the
Speaker 1: same habitat don't have this structure. Instead, their back walls
Speaker 1: reflect incoming calls off to the sides. So as the
Speaker 1: wooly bats pepper the forest with high pitched squeaks, the
Speaker 1: echoes from in Him's leana should stand out like a beacon.
Speaker 1: So the researchers also tested this apparent function by modifying
Speaker 1: some of the plants sort of hidden among shrubbery in
Speaker 1: a tin full of bats to see if it would
Speaker 1: change the rate at which the bats were attracted to
Speaker 1: the plants, and it did. In a paper published in
Speaker 1: Current Biology, UH, the authors found that if you took
Speaker 1: one of these plants and you sort of amputated its
Speaker 1: reflective surfaces, the bats couldn't find it as quickly and
Speaker 1: ed writes quote and when given a choe as they
Speaker 1: mostly entered pictures with natural, unaltered reflectors. So here's a
Speaker 1: case where the plant has evolved to instead of specializing
Speaker 1: in capturing, trapping, and eating insects, it specializes in providing
Speaker 1: a good home for bats to poop in it, and
Speaker 1: even changing its own shape over the generations to become
Speaker 1: a better attractor of bats because it reflects the sounds
Speaker 1: they make better. Now, this is not the only picture
Speaker 1: plant that has come to specialize in receiving poop as
Speaker 1: a as a main part of its diet. There's another
Speaker 1: picture plant called a Nepenthes lowy that does something similar
Speaker 1: by functioning as a kind of delicious toilet for tree
Speaker 1: shrews in borneo u. The young versions of this plant
Speaker 1: tend to trap ants and other insects like a normal
Speaker 1: picture plant would, but the more mature plants, which grow
Speaker 1: up higher in the air on vines and other plants,
Speaker 1: they attract tree shrews with sweet nectar, and while the
Speaker 1: shrews are perched on the plant licking the nectar, the
Speaker 1: shrews poop inside the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to the
Speaker 1: plant and In fact, the mature aerial plants really don't
Speaker 1: trap many insects at all. They just want poop, that's all.
Speaker 1: It's just tree shrew come and poop in me. And
Speaker 1: they've evolved to specialize in this. While most carnivorous picture
Speaker 1: plants have these slippery rims I mentioned, right, you know,
Speaker 1: they want a slippery side on the pictures, so the
Speaker 1: insects fall in, the mature uh plants of the low
Speaker 1: E species don't have a slippery rim. Instead, they've got
Speaker 1: a rim that the tree shrew can stand on safely
Speaker 1: and poop comfortably. After all, like you wouldn't design a
Speaker 1: human toilet with like a lubricated seat, right, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't want people slipping around. So I also found
Speaker 1: another more recent study by the same authors of that
Speaker 1: study ed Young road about and isn't at gop s,
Speaker 1: but with some other authors in a Journal of Ecology
Speaker 1: in two seventeen, called ecological outsourcing. A picture plant benefits
Speaker 1: from transferring predigestion of prey to a bat mutualist uh
Speaker 1: So they point out here that you know, mutualism is
Speaker 1: a type of symbiosis between two species in which both
Speaker 1: species gain a net benefit from the interaction. UH classic
Speaker 1: examples would be like animals in their gut flora. The
Speaker 1: gut flora gets something out of it, you get something
Speaker 1: out of it. But also like flowering plants and pollinating insects,
Speaker 1: where the insect might get nectar and the plant might
Speaker 1: get reproductive material spread around, you both get a net positive.
Speaker 1: And so the authors point out that lots of ecologists
Speaker 1: believe that a lot of times mutualism seems to evolve
Speaker 1: when a service that an organism originally had to perform
Speaker 1: for itself could be done better by another species. And
Speaker 1: the authors refer to this as quote ecological outsourcing. So
Speaker 1: an example would be a plant that used to have some,
Speaker 1: you know, very ineffective way of spreading pollen around, but
Speaker 1: then insects began spreading the pollen in a much more
Speaker 1: efficient and targeted way. But of course, how would you
Speaker 1: test that it evolved this way. Well, the authors came
Speaker 1: up with a way to test this using that relationship
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier between the picture plant nipenhees hims lana
Speaker 1: and Hardwick's wooly bat, the care Caravoula hardwicki. And so
Speaker 1: the picture plant houses the bat like we said, the
Speaker 1: bat poops inside the plant gets necessary nitrogen, and the
Speaker 1: authors write about their method quote, we measured the benefits
Speaker 1: of ecological outsourcing by comparing survival growth, photosynthesis, and nutrient
Speaker 1: content of in Him's Leona plants fed with bat feces
Speaker 1: to those fed with arthropods. To investigate the costs of
Speaker 1: such outsourcing processes, we repeated the experiment with the closest relative,
Speaker 1: Nepenthees rafless Cianna that is not adapted to digest bat feces.
Speaker 1: So the authors found that Him's Leyana plants fed on
Speaker 1: a diet of poop had better survival growth and photosynthesis
Speaker 1: than plants of the same species that were given only
Speaker 1: insects instead. Quote. On average, plants covered nine of their
Speaker 1: nitrogen demand from feces under strong nutrient deprivation. But what
Speaker 1: about those non poop adapted species of plant that got
Speaker 1: to try out a poop diet in this experiment The
Speaker 1: author's right quote, Despite raf. Lysiana's higher arthropod capture rate,
Speaker 1: feces covered a large part of this species nutrient demand
Speaker 1: as well, suggesting low costs for outsourcing. And then, finally,
Speaker 1: the author's right quote, outsourcing pre capture and digestion to
Speaker 1: the mutualism partner seems to be a beneficial strategy for
Speaker 1: in Him's leana. It may explain the evolutionary trend of
Speaker 1: several carnivorous plants to lose their carnivorous traits while increasing
Speaker 1: their attractiveness to mutualistic partners. On a much broader scale,
Speaker 1: we propose that ecological outsourcing could be one of the
Speaker 1: major drivers for the evolution and maintenance of mutualisms. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you can think of the bats as
Speaker 1: providing a kind of predigestion service for the picture plant.
Speaker 1: The bat eats the nitrogen rich food source, breaks it down,
Speaker 1: then releases it into the plant's mouth. It makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: Why eat the insects directly when you can eat this
Speaker 1: byproduct of the insects at the bad eats. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it also makes me think about you know, when we've
Speaker 1: talked about the possible origins of predations in the Cambrian period,
Speaker 1: like if organisms we don't know that this happened, but
Speaker 1: just if it's possible that predation began when scavenging or
Speaker 1: organisms eating sort of like dead other animal matter just
Speaker 1: sort of transitioned to live animals. Uh, this could be
Speaker 1: a sort of like backward transition of that kind, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, And and again it also forces us
Speaker 1: to rethink what is going on in digestion, what is
Speaker 1: going on in the transformation from food to poop? Totally
Speaker 1: all right, So I want to come back to humans again.
Speaker 1: So at this point, yeah, if you don't want to
Speaker 1: hear about human coveraphagia, um, maybe you want to check
Speaker 1: out for this episode. But hopefully at this point we've
Speaker 1: demystified it a bit, uh, and you're ready to hear
Speaker 1: a little bit about humans and also some of our
Speaker 1: our our ape relatives. So of course, human a prophagia
Speaker 1: has long been the subject of various curses, insults, and
Speaker 1: of course art. I think we can all think to
Speaker 1: to various um works of literature or cinema that the
Speaker 1: drag out coprophagia is, especially as I've seen it popular
Speaker 1: in like nineteen seventies cinema, especially avant garde stuff where
Speaker 1: they want to I guess say something like really like
Speaker 1: stark and disturbing about the nature of human existence. Yes,
Speaker 1: the spirit of the Marquis assad Yeah, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of of of of poop eating in that for sure. Um.
Speaker 1: But really, I mean any amount of poop eating tends
Speaker 1: to stand out in the work and and and you
Speaker 1: run the risk of it overshadowing everything else that you're
Speaker 1: attempting to do. A couple of cinematic high points low points,
Speaker 1: uh that come to mind in this area. There's, of course, uh,
Speaker 1: the scene in John Waters Pink Flamingos in which the
Speaker 1: actor Divine eats dog feces. And I later heard an
Speaker 1: interview from him talking with the Fresh Air Terry Gross
Speaker 1: about and talked about like calling the doctor afterwards and
Speaker 1: claiming that a child had eaten dog feces and he
Speaker 1: wanted to see, if, you know, if the child was
Speaker 1: going to get sick, and the doctor was like reassuring
Speaker 1: him that it would, you know, would probably be okay. Um.
Speaker 1: Another great scene, of course is the scene in Caddy
Speaker 1: Shack where Bill Murray's character retrieves the suspected feces which
Speaker 1: is actually a candy bar from the bottom of the
Speaker 1: pool and uh and and holds it up, sniffs it
Speaker 1: and invites into it. But anyway, the point here is
Speaker 1: that for humans is largely something that's relegated to the
Speaker 1: room of madness, perversion, and horror. It's also been done
Speaker 1: as an act of protest, and indeed it's it's considered
Speaker 1: an extraordinary disorder of human behavior when it occurs. We're
Speaker 1: not like those animals that sometimes eat poop for nutritional
Speaker 1: deficiency reasons. Right, our closest ape relatives don't benefit from
Speaker 1: the act as other animals do. Chimps have been observed
Speaker 1: to do it in laboratory conditions, probably due to dietary
Speaker 1: deficiencies or captivity induced behavioral problem. Now, as for guerrillas,
Speaker 1: I was reading a bit about this in the primate
Speaker 1: conservation paper UH Coprophasia and Intestinal Parasites Implications to human
Speaker 1: habituated mountain guerrillas. This is by Grassic and Cranfield from
Speaker 1: two thousand three, and they wrote that coprophasia is commonly
Speaker 1: observed in mountain guerrillas. Adults sometimes eat their own feces
Speaker 1: following defecation, or the old feces of other guerrillas, which
Speaker 1: is interesting they didn't I don't think they really went
Speaker 1: into all this and do this all that much. But
Speaker 1: it comes back to the whole freshness thing. I wonder,
Speaker 1: why eat the old poop? But Anyway, infants sometimes eat
Speaker 1: feces of other guerrillas or other animals, and it's considered normal,
Speaker 1: and it's been argued that the gut flora explanation is
Speaker 1: likely valid here. It's thought that their herbivore diet likely
Speaker 1: benefits from some level of symbian seating. However, with this
Speaker 1: sort of practice comes the possibility of parasites, and indeed,
Speaker 1: a survey identified forty one species of indo parasites from
Speaker 1: cat to been wild guerillas, twenty nine of which can
Speaker 1: be transmitted by coprophagia. However, they also stressed that coprophagia
Speaker 1: has been quote generally neglected in medical parasitology, except in
Speaker 1: mentally retarded people with behavioral apparitions such as coprophagia or
Speaker 1: co prophilia, requiring institutionalization. Again, we're clearly a non coprophagias species.
Speaker 1: It isn't a normal part of our behavior, so it's
Speaker 1: not something we're evolved to do with much proficiency. I
Speaker 1: was also reading an International Journal of Psychological and Brain
Speaker 1: Sciences article titled Coprophilia feces lust in the forms of coprophagia,
Speaker 1: coprio spheres, scatolia and plastering and dementia patients are Thoughts
Speaker 1: and Experience, which is a good paper, but certainly, um,
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like a fund read. It's not exactly
Speaker 1: a fun read, but it's it was insightful. It's it's
Speaker 1: not the first thing you want to read during your
Speaker 1: coprophagia research. But they pointed out that in primates that
Speaker 1: the consumption of feast these may serve quote as a
Speaker 1: behavioral adaptation that provides animals access to energy and nutrients
Speaker 1: and maybe an important nutritional source for older and ordentally
Speaker 1: impaired individuals during the dry season. Dentically impaired meaning they
Speaker 1: just don't have the teeth to handle certain foods. Oh
Speaker 1: I didn't even think about that. The idea that, uh,
Speaker 1: for some animals species could be just an easier food source,
Speaker 1: and it's something to fall back on when you can't
Speaker 1: maybe chew up the normal kind of stuff you would
Speaker 1: be eating. It is predigested, like you said, uh, And
Speaker 1: then they suggest the following quote, Dimentia patients have a
Speaker 1: diminished mental capacity that constantly is being reduced towards a
Speaker 1: capacity analog to a newborn's possibly acquiring all primordial instincts. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: as nutritional decrease in the amount eaten, which is all egophagia.
Speaker 1: That the eating of only a few foods uh together
Speaker 1: with the loss of weight, is probably the most common
Speaker 1: disturbance in dementia UH, something that could lead in a
Speaker 1: search for supplementary food sources. So they point out that.
Speaker 1: They also point out the dementia can also result in
Speaker 1: the hyper sexuality and sexually just uh inhibited behaviors, which
Speaker 1: could also entail the sort of activity they're also known
Speaker 1: to make and throw copra spheres in the manner of
Speaker 1: other primates, which is also curious. So poop balls balls right, Um.
Speaker 1: They reject the idea though that is linked directly to
Speaker 1: dietary deficiency. But I feel like this this is putting
Speaker 1: like a weird and interesting spin on it, like the
Speaker 1: idea that it is in dementia patients, which seems to
Speaker 1: be the the the only area where it really occurs.
Speaker 1: That it is kind of this primordial return to some
Speaker 1: like very base h like primate activities. Well that somehow
Speaker 1: you may be a result of like instincts that are
Speaker 1: activated but normally inhibited. Yeah yeah, so but again they
Speaker 1: they say that this is an area that really needs
Speaker 1: needs more research. Um, they said, there's actually there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of hope for dimentia patients exhibiting this sort
Speaker 1: of behavior, and that more study is needed, but of
Speaker 1: course also more empathy. There's apparently a tendency in institutional
Speaker 1: environments to provide less care to such individuals, and if
Speaker 1: there's hope to be had, they say, it's through empathy
Speaker 1: and interventions of psychological and pharmacological nature. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: certainly see how that could be the case. Like it's
Speaker 1: an unfortunate case where like a very gross symptom makes
Speaker 1: it actually harder for a person to get the care
Speaker 1: they need, just because like the people who would be
Speaker 1: providing the care find it repulsive or something. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you know, because they're also gonna be they're
Speaker 1: gonna be dirtier because of this activity. It just and it,
Speaker 1: and then you end up invoking all these human taboos,
Speaker 1: which even in a clinical environment with trained professionals like
Speaker 1: in in the best of conditions, that can see where
Speaker 1: it would definitely be Uh, you could definitely prove a challenge.
Speaker 1: Now to close out with something a little more fun.
Speaker 1: From that paper, Um, they did point out that quote
Speaker 1: in ancient Greece. During the orgies dedicated to the god Dionysus,
Speaker 1: bizarre erotic fetishes were in constant use. Many depictions of
Speaker 1: people defecating in clay pots during an orgy proved the
Speaker 1: narcissistic erotic deviation in ancient cultures. It sounds almost judgmental, right,
Speaker 1: But they included some images of this, uh in the
Speaker 1: in the paper. That paper had had a lot of images,
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of photos. Um. But again,
Speaker 1: I feel like human coprophagia uh. Though certain certainly um
Speaker 1: a tricky subject, even it makes a lot more sense
Speaker 1: having looked at how it works within the normal behaviors
Speaker 1: of many animals. Yeah, I agree. Now I have a question, actually, yes,
Speaker 1: is dung vegetarian? Well, a lot of the dung we've
Speaker 1: talked about is is herbivore dung? Yeah, that be a
Speaker 1: follow up question. I guess, does it matter whether the
Speaker 1: dung is the dung of a carnivore of or of
Speaker 1: a herbivore it is an animal product in a way? Well,
Speaker 1: I did not. I guess maybe the question would be
Speaker 1: as dung vegan? Well, I feel like I don't feel
Speaker 1: like we really discussed any carnivores in this episode. I mean,
Speaker 1: everything was at least an omnivore, if not a nerbivore. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't come across any research involving carprophagia among carnivores,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I'm not sure. Um, I didn't see any
Speaker 1: articles about cats or big cats or pack hunters, So
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's a that's a that's an interesting
Speaker 1: question to leave out on. I'm not saying we're gonna
Speaker 1: come back for Coprophagia Part two, but uh, but it
Speaker 1: is worth worth looking at. Well, here's a question start
Speaker 1: with on part two. Is dung paleo? I don't know.
Speaker 1: In some respects, maybe it is that that maybe so
Speaker 1: maybe so all right, so there we have it. We're
Speaker 1: gonna go and close it out here. Obviously a lot
Speaker 1: of people are gonna have some comments on this. UM.
Speaker 1: Probably related to your pet rabbits, your pet dogs, maybe
Speaker 1: farm animals, pet gorilla, pet gorilla's Uh, maybe you you
Speaker 1: professionally have some sort of inside here. Maybe you've worked
Speaker 1: with THEMNIA patients, you know, I've uh, we're we're up
Speaker 1: for any kind of insight into this topic that you,
Speaker 1: the listener may have to share with us. In the meantime,
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