We’ve done it mates. We’ve finally done it. We finally know why wombats make square poos.
Thanks to scientists from the University of Tasmania, the age-old question of why the bloody hell do wombats make teeny tiny little cubes of shit is finally answered. And as it turns out, it’s not because they’ve got a square butthole.
“This is a puzzle with wombats that’s been around for such a long time,” wildlife ecologist Scott Carver told AAP.
“We discovered cubes inside the soft intestines. It was such an unusual thing, because how do you make cubes in a soft tube?
“It was quite contrary to the hypotheses out there.”
So basically, it all comes down to their super-long intestines, which have varying levels of muscle thickness that helps to shape the poop on the way out.
Their intestines are a whopping 10 metres long, which is about four times longer than our measly human ones.
There are two stiff regions of the intestine and two flexible regions, in which the poop is shaped as it dries out and exits the body.
“It’s really quite unusual. Kangaroos will often have one or two flat-ish sides but they don’t have the corners,” Carver said.
But to make matters even more interesting, wombats reportedly use their shit as a form of communication, which is uhh… something.
“Wombats have [a] really strong sense of smell. They will leave (faeces) on a prominent rock, or a log or small rise in their home range,” Carver explained.
“We think that it is a form of communicating who’s present and possibly other things like reproductive status.
“We think that the cubed shape helps them aggregate. So when they get deposited on an uneven surface they don’t roll away as much.”
So now that we’ve worked out the wombat poop mystery, can we *please* focus on the more important scientific issue at hand here:
HOW DO EELS FUCK?
