Poo, Spew and Other Gross Things Animals Do! 9781486314867, 9781486314874, 9781486316625, 1486314864

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Copyright
Title page
About the book
Contents
About the authors
Chapter 1: Animal grossness
Chapter 2: You ate what?!
Chapter 3: Home, stinky home
Chapter 4: Love is gross
Chapter 5: Grossness as self-defence
Chapter 6: Poo detectives
Chapter 7: Gross stuff makes the world go round
Chapter 8: World’s grossest animals revealed
Grossary
Poos of the world
Acknowledgements
Index
Picture credits
Back cover

Citation preview

artwork by rachel tribout

© Text Nicole Gill and Romane Cristescu 2022 © Illustrations Rachel Tribout 2022 All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO Publishing for all permission requests. Nicole Gill and Romane Cristescu (authors) and Rachel Tribout (illustrator) assert their right to be known as the creators of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia. ISBN: 9781486314867 (pbk) ISBN: 9781486314874 (epdf) ISBN: 9781486316625 (epub) Published by: CSIRO Publishing Private Bag 10 Clayton South VIC 3169 Australia Telephone: +61 3 9545 8400 Email: [email protected] Website: www.publish.csiro.au Sign up to our email alerts: publish.csiro.au/earlyalert Edited by Dr Kath Kovac Cover design, text design and layout by Rachel Tribout Printed in China by Leo Paper Products Ltd Page 81: the second paragraph is a text extract from ‘On Southern Islands’ (2018), Jenny Scott. No. 68 in ‘The Peoples Library’, Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward, A Published Event, Hobart. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and illustrator and do not necessarily represent those of, and should not be attributed to, the publisher or CSIRO. CSIRO acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands that we live and work on across Australia and pays its respect to Elders past and present. CSIRO recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have made and will continue to make extraordinary contributions to all aspects of Australian life including culture, economy and science. CSIRO is committed to reconciliation and demonstrating respect for Indigenous knowledge and science. The use of Western science in this publication should not be interpreted as diminishing the knowledge of plants, animals and environment from Indigenous ecological knowledge systems.

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In this book, you might see some words in brackets in italics that look a bit like this: (Wordus complicatedus). These are the scientific names of species of animals, plants or other organisms. We use them when there is no common name for a species, or to be certain we are talking about the same species across different places and countries. For example, cat is Mao in Chinese and Köttur in Icelandic, but its scientific name never changes: Felis catus.

NOTE FOR READERS: Some words are written in bold. These terms are explained in the glossary (or grossary!) at the end of the book.

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CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS . . ................................................................................. 6 CHAPTER 1: ANIMAL GROSSNESS.................................................................. 8 CHAPTER 2: YOU ATE WHAT?!......................................................................18 CHAPTER 3: HOME, STINKY HOME.............................................................. 26 CHAPTER 4: LOVE IS GROSS.. ...................................................................... 34 CHAPTER 5: GROSSNESS AS SELF-DEFENCE................................................ 42 CHAPTER 6: POO DETECTIVES.................................................................... 52 CHAPTER 7: GROSS STUFF MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND.. ....................... 60 CHAPTER 8: WORLD’S GROSSEST ANIMALS REVEALED................................ 72 GROSSARY.................................................................................................. 82 POOS OF THE WORLD . . ............................................................................... 87 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.. ............................................................................... 88 INDEX.........................................................................................................90 PICTURE CREDITS....................................................................................... 92

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Nic Gill is a Tasmanian author, who writes on nature, humans and other animals for readers of all ages. Her first book, Animal Eco-Warriors, was a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book. She’s also written extensively on nature, humans and other animals for readers of all ages. Nic lives in south-eastern Tasmania with her partner, James; her rescue cat, Nimbus; her working dogs, Zorro and Gromit; and an assortment of tiny, opinionated chickens. When not writing about gross things, you’ll often find Nic looking for them with Zorro and Gromit, as part of her work as a conservation-detection dog handler, or reading about them in books. Zorro and Gromit are also avid consumers of books, albeit in a more literal sense than Nic would like.

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Dr Romane Cristescu trained as a vet in France before relocating to Australia via Africa to study koala genetics for her PhD. She is one of the founders of the University of the Sunshine Coast’s ‘Detection Dogs for Conservation’, and the owner/handler/ manager of a range of Very Good Dogs who specialise in finding animals and their poo. These include Maya the wonder-dog, featured in Animal Eco-Warriors, and Bear – social-media darling and star of the post-bushfire koala rescue project. She is also a poo science evangelist, who likes nothing more than holding forth at otherwise polite parties, discussing the illuminating qualities of animal excrement.

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CHAPTER 1:

ANIMAL GROSSNESS WARNING: this book is full of stories of poo, spew, and other gross things animals do in daily life.

If you’re feeling squeamish, this might not be the book for you. Put it down now, and pick one with baby elephants in it. Adorable! Or slugs. Did you know that there are bright yellow slugs that look like slimy bananas? Actually, maybe stick with the baby elephant book. Look – there’s no nice way of saying this. Animals are gross. Some of them eat their own poo. Others sleep in bubbles made of their own snot. And still others wipe their wee all over their family members. On purpose. But they don’t do this stuff for fun. Being gross actually helps them survive. And what an animal leaves behind, from its behind, can help us find out more about how they live. So if you’re feeling brave, and haven’t eaten recently, read on to find out about the horrid things animals do when they think no-one else is watching.

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KNOW YOUR POO What exactly IS poo? Everybody does it. But nobody wants to talk about it, at least not in public. However, if you look at the English language, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we might be a bit obsessed with the products of our bottoms. Just look at the number of words we have to describe poo in its many and varied forms: poop, excreta,

excrement, faeces (FEE-sees), faecal (FEEkal) matter, stools, droppings, waste matter, meconium, frass, dung, manure, spraint, doodoo – that’s not even including the naughty words! And it’s true in other languages, too. Ask any friend or relative who speaks a second language to tell you a few of their words for poo. You may think of poo as the waste product that remains, and gets promptly disposed of, after the body has digested food and absorbed all the nutrients from it. Or, you may just think of it as that smelly stuff that mysteriously appears in your toilet bowl, then disappears with a push of a button – or perhaps those soft squishy things you sometimes tread on by accident at the dog park (ew!).

According to the Oxford Dictionary, poo, a.k.a. faeces, is ‘waste matter left after food has been digested, discharged from the bowels’.

However, you might be surprised to learn what poo is actually made of. The average human poo is 75 per cent water – so three of every four plops of poo are actually drops of water. And the rest? A quarter to half of the dry matter in every poo is actually made of microbes! It’s estimated that a gram of poo contains about 100 billion bacteria, 100 million to 1 billion viruses and up to a million fungi – all of which used to live in the ecosystem of your gut. Scientists have recently realised how important animals’ gut ecosystems are. Together, they are referred to as gut microbiota. Microbiota, and especially bacteria, are a huge part of any animal, including us humans. They exist everywhere in your body, not just in your guts. Did you know that your body contains more bacterial cells than human cells? So technically, we are more bacteria than human. In fact, the weight of bacteria in your body is about the same as the weight of your brain!

Now, back to the gut microbiota. This diverse bunch of bacteria, viruses, fungi and friends actually play critical roles in digesting food, and we have known that for a long time. But more unexpectedly, we’ve discovered that the microbiota helps the immune system function properly, as well as the brain, and even affects our moods. The rest of a human poo is a mixed bag of: ff food your digestive system wasn’t able to

break down and absorb (such as fibres from vegetables) ff substances your body produced to help

digest your food (such as the bile released by your liver) ff waste created by the bacteria in your guts ff a few cells that have been shed from your colon

(the biggest section of your large intestines).

Poo comes in all shapes and sizes – and smells, too! Learn how to use your sense of smell to do some detective work using ‘What poo is that?’ on page 58.

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WHAT ABOUT WEE?

POO PROFILES

Although you might want to label poo and wee as similar types of ‘bodily waste’, when it comes to how we make them, they couldn’t be more different. Sure, they both contain things the body rejected, but in very different ways.

Almost every animal poos, but not necessarily in the same way that humans do. In our bodies, the processes of pooing and weeing are completely separate. But that’s not the case for many other creatures.

The solid part of poo is made of matter that never really entered your body. It started off as food in your mouth, and was then chewed up by your teeth. It passed down your throat, travelled through your guts, and left your body when you went to the toilet. But those undigested bits of food never actually passed through the barrier that marks the official border between your body and the outside world, which is known as the mucous membranes. In other words, the food waste was actually outside your ‘inner’ body the entire time. The technical term for the removal of these solid wastes from your body is egestion (ee-JEST-shun). Unlike poo, urine – what we often call wee or pee – is created inside your body, and carries the waste products created inside your cells. The body’s efficient garbage collector – your blood – picks up these waste products from your cells, and carries them along to your kidneys. There, the waste is carefully filtered out and concentrated, before being collected in your bladder. Eventually, the urine squirts out of the bladder through a tube called the urethra when you take a pee. The technical term for this discharge of waste is excretion.

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Birds, amphibians (such as frogs), reptiles and monotremes (echidnas and platypuses) are examples of animals that have only one ‘exit’ for both their wee and poo, not two. The opening is called the cloaca (klo-AK-ah). And it’s also where bird eggs come from – talk about multitasking!

Poo and wee can also look very different depending on which creature has created them. In many birds, poo is the little bit of black stuff that sits on a runny, white blob, which is the urine. Lizard poo often looks quite like a tiny, human poo – a small, brown sausage – but adorned with a little white tip. The white bit is actually their urine, and is surprisingly solid.

bird poo gecko poo

While these poo variations may seem a little odd, they’re nowhere near as odd as some of the alternatives. There is even one type of animal that doesn’t poo at all! Read on to reveal its identity … Poo and pee come out together in many birds and reptiles.

POO-FILLED ANIMALS THAT LIVE (AND DIE) IN YOUR FACE Meet the demodex mite. In fact, you probably already have – they make their homes in the pores of our faces! Demodex mites are tiny bugs closely related to ticks. Buried in our faces, they live brief, happy lives, eating our facial oil and growing increasingly fat. You see, demodex mites don’t have an anus (the scientific term for a bumhole). This means that during their lives, poo builds up in their abdomens, making them bigger … and bigger …

‘But wait!’ we hear you protest. ‘At least that means demodex mites don’t poo on my face, so that’s good news, right?’ Nope. When a demodex mite dies, its body bursts or collapses, releasing a lifetime of poo into your facial pores. Unsurprisingly, this can cause skin problems in some people. Probably best not to think about it too much. Let’s move onto something a little less distressing.

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ON YOUR MARKS, GET SET, POO! Mammals come in all sizes, and so does their poo. Think of the differences between a cat, a gorilla and an elephant. Generally speaking, the larger the animal, the larger the poo.

Mammals have widely diverse diets, which means they have diverse types of poo (more on this in Chapter 6). Some are herbivores, and only eat grass and other plants. Some are carnivores, mainly eating other animals. And some are fructivores, mostly making meals out of delicious fruits!

The videos showed that pretty much all the mammals filmed took about 12 seconds to complete their ‘business’, give or take a few seconds. The researchers concluded that despite differences in size, the poo of all mammals slid out of their anus on a layer of mucus ‘similar to a sled sliding down a chute’. This meant that every poo took similar times to emerge. They even built mathematical models to support their conclusions – and you thought maths was boring!

Gross fact: People are so interested in poo that the world actually has several ‘poozeums’: yes, that’s museums dedicated to poo!

Some foods are harder to digest than others, so different foods can stay in mammals’ bodies for various lengths of time. For example, ferrets digest food in as little as two hours, while a sloth can take more than six days to properly digest even a modest meal. Knowing all these differences, you might expect the time taken for mammals to poo to be as variable as the animals themselves. But scientists who chose to study the poo habits of zoo animals discovered something quite astonishing. The researchers set up cameras in a range of enclosures, and filmed the mammals as they pooed. (You can read this paper on the internet – and even watch videos! Just like poo, science comes in all shapes and sizes.)

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Splat! Although poo comes in all shapes, colours, consistencies and smells, one thing doesn’t vary much – the time it takes for mammals to squeeze them out. So the cow that made this pat was busy for about as long as you might be on the toilet!

ADVANCED EXCREMENT When it comes to disposing of bodily waste products, just weeing and pooing doesn’t cut it for some animals. Many birds, including ravens, owls, eagles and hawks, have an extra method for getting rid of waste. They vomit it up in a big, gross pellet – a bit like a cat furball, but with more bones and teeth in it.

TEETH ON THE INSIDE

bone fragments

12 cm

When was the last time you saw a bird visiting the dentist? Unless it was there for the free toothpaste samples, a bird would have no reason to visit a dentist, because birds don’t have teeth. (A few birds, like geese, have some toothylooking edges on their beaks, but that’s another story.) Many animals rely on their teeth to begin the process of breaking down their meals. But birds do things a little differently – they do their chewing on the inside.

Giant cat furball? No! These are pellets from a Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle.

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OWL PELLETS – LIKE POO, BUT BETTER Like all modern birds, owls don’t have any teeth, and their beaks are not especially powerful. As a result, they often gobble down their prey – including mice, lizards, frogs, insects and other small birds – completely whole. Unlike a lot of other birds, including other birds of prey and chickens, owls don’t have a crop, which is a kind of storage pouch in the throat. Instead, the animals they eat slide straight from their mouths into the first chamber of their stomachs – called the glandular stomach, or proventriculus (PRO-ven-TRIK-you-luss). The proventriculus is basically a bag of digestive juices, filled with chemicals that help to dissolve the owl’s meal. Once the unfortunate prey has been mushed up a bit in the proventriculus, it then slides down into the second part of the owl’s stomach, called the muscular stomach or gizzard.

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This is where things start to get really rough. The muscular walls of the owl’s gizzard squish and grind the prey’s body into little pieces. This lets the liquid, digestible bits move further into the digestive system to be absorbed and provide energy for the owl. Left behind are the indigestible hair, teeth, fur and bones. It would be dangerous for the owl to try to break down sharp bones and teeth – they could punch a hole in its fragile intestines. Instead, the gizzard squashes all the leftovers into a disgusting ball of hair and bones, and squeezes it back up to the owl’s proventriculus. This whole process can take a while – up to an entire day – and while the owl is still digesting its last meal, it can’t eat anything else. The owl has to hack up, or ‘cast’ the pellet, which is covered in slime for ease of spewing, before it is ready to hunt again. Owls sometimes have a favourite perch they like to sit on to cast up pellets. Finding a pile of owl pellets on the ground can be a clue for ecologists that owls are nearby.

Old Tasmanian masked owl pellets sometimes get a bit mouldy – gross!

Looking at owl pellets up close can tell you a lot about the animals that have been eaten. Because owls often swallow their prey whole, if you pull apart an owl pellet and carefully sort through the bones, with enough time and patience, you could actually put together a whole mouse skeleton. And in some biology classes, students do just that!

DARE YOU PROBE AN OWL PELLET? Warning! Not so fast! If you’re lucky enough to find an owl pellet, and want to pull it apart to see what’s inside, make sure you take some precautions to prevent throwing up yourself! For starters, any younger readers need to find a responsible adult to help you out with this – owl pellets can be icky, and you’ll need a laboratory assistant to keep things clean and tidy. Owl pellets can also carry diseases that can make you sick. Before you dive into spew-dissection, put on some disposable gloves, and ask your lab assistant to sterilise the pellet first (put it on a foil-lined baking tray in the oven for four hours at 120 °C). Sometimes, owls and other birds of prey catch rats and mice that have eaten rodenticides (rat and mouse poison), which make them slower and easier to catch. Unfortunately, the owls can then get secondary poisoning. Because the owls throw up some parts of the poisoned rodent bodies in pellet form, the pellets can also be poisonous. Another reason to handle with care!

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PELLETS VS VOMIT Are bird pellets actually vomit? Not really. Healthy birds can throw up, or regurgitate, for several reasons. Some birds will bring up the contents of their crop to feed their young, or impress another bird they fancy (we advise against trying this on a human). If they’re a pet parrot, they might spew soft, partially digested food onto you to show that they like hanging out with you! Regurgitating pellets of undigested materials, such as bones, hair or insect body parts, is a normal, non-stressful part of daily life for birds ranging from owls to seagulls. It’s also necessary for them to stay healthy. Actual vomit is a sign that a bird is unwell, possibly from something they’ve eaten or an infection. When a sick bird throws up, the vomit is liquid, or mostly so. The nasty stuff comes up fast and often messily. If your pet bird starts spewing liquid everywhere, you should definitely consider taking it to the vet.

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IS HONEY REALLY BEE VOMIT? Well, yes. But no. Bees suck up nectar from flowers through their proboscis (pro-BOSS-kiss). The nectar flows down into a ‘honey stomach’, or crop (like birds have), which is separate from the stomach that digests the bee’s food. In the honey stomach, protein molecules known as enzymes mix with the nectar to begin to form the honey. The bees then spew the mixture back out their mouths into the mouths of other bees. They process the honey goo by chewing on it a bit more, before spitting it into the mouths of other bees, and so on, and so on. Eventually, the last bee spits the honey out and stores in the honeycomb cells they prepared earlier. So, honey isn’t actually vomit, because it doesn’t come from the bees’ food stomachs – although they do spew it out of their mouths! Luckily, it tastes so good that no-one really seems to mind.

WHO FARTED? Elephants do it. Zebras do it, especially when they’re scared. Cows do it almost constantly, while some fish do it to keep in touch with their friends. But birds don’t – and neither do sloths. Lots of animals fart, and most of the time, it’s not even for fun. For humans and most other mammals, farts are a mix of gases that are a by-product of digestion. That gas has to get out somehow, otherwise we’d explode! For most mammals, the gas leaves via the rear exit through the bumhole, but in some cases, that’s just not an option. Sloths eat lots of fibre-rich plants and can go weeks between poos. They can’t afford to have all that gas backing up inside them – they might burst! So instead, the gas that would form their farts is reabsorbed through their intestines, back into their bloodstream and into their lungs. The sloth then breathes it out – maybe that’s a reason they don’t have many close friends!

Gross fact: Manatees, also known as sea cows, are marine mammals that use their farts to help them float or sink!

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CHAPTER 2:

YOU ATE WHAT?! What do you like to eat when you’re hungry? Do you dream of a delicious roast dinner, or the sweet smell of a chocolate cake baking in the oven? Well, we’re sorry to ruin your appetite, but some animals’ idea of a mouth-watering dinner or tasty snack might make you want to skip your next meal!

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POO-EATING ANIMALS

VACUUM CLEANERS OF THE DEEP

Have you ever looked into the toilet bowl and thought, ‘mmm, a delicious snack!’?

Sea cucumbers are rather a strange sight. They look almost exactly as their name suggests – like a big, soft cucumber lying on the ocean floor. (To be honest, some of them look a lot like giant poos themselves!)

We think not. But strangely enough, coprophagy (KOP-row-FAY-gee) is surprisingly common across the animal kingdom. Although we may see poo as disgusting waste, to other animals it is a precious, delicious resource.

But there is more to sea cucumbers than their stunning good looks. They do indeed suck up other animals’ poo, providing a valuable service to their environment. These sea-floor pooper scoopers also filter out other bits and pieces that fall to the ocean floor. This keeps down levels of waste that would otherwise smother their sandy homes. Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates the sea cucumbers’ hard work. Other animals – including humans – consider them quite tasty. Lacking much in the way of defensive features (no teeth to bite, no legs to run away), some sea cucumbers have been forced to go to extremes to fight off predators. When threatened, this brave invertebrate contracts its muscles, and squeezing tightly, shoots some of its internal organs straight out of its butthole into the face of the would-be attacker! Once it’s escaped, the sea cucumber later regrows its organs, and goes back to a quiet life of keeping its patch of ocean floor nice and tidy.

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AUTOCOPROPHAGY – A BIG WORD FOR A GROSS HABIT If your dog eats its own poo, it’s sometimes not a good sign, and might warrant a trip to the vet. But for other animals, eating their poo isn’t just normal – it’s vital. The practice of eating one’s own poo is called autocoprophagy (OR-toh-KOP-row-FAY-gee). Rabbits commonly dine on their own number twos. They produce a type of poo called caecotropes (SEE-ko-TROPES), also known as night faeces. Caecotropes are made up of partially digested grass and herbs, and are produced in a part of the rabbit’s digestive tract called the caecum (SEE-kum). Once the food’s nutrients have been released inside the caecum, the mushy grass mix gets packed into a grape-shaped bunch and sent out the rabbit’s butt, where it is immediately collected and eaten by the same hungry bunny. The caecotropes will then be digested a second time, allowing the rabbit to get maximum nutrition from its meals. Without these caecotrope superfoods, rabbits wouldn’t survive. Koalas eat poo too, but for different reasons. Check out this chapter’s Scientist Profile to find out!

A burrowing owl on the lookout for its next perfect bit of poo.

WOULD YOU LIKE POO WITH THAT? Burrowing owls, Athene cunicularia (ahTHEEN-ee kew-nik-you-LAH-ree-ah) are not just some of the cutest birds you could hope to meet – they are also some of the weirdest. As you probably guessed, burrowing owls make their homes underground in burrows, unlike most other owls, who roost above the ground in trees, buildings or caves. Burrowing owls are also diurnal – that is, active during the daytime, rather than at night like most other owls, which are nocturnal. But perhaps their most quirky (and disgusting) habits are related to how they catch their dinner. The burrowing owl, you see, has quite unusual tastes in home decoration. At its burrow entrance, you can admire a stunning arrangement of poo of all sizes and shapes – cow, horse, dog, cat, antelope …! If any animal relieves itself nearby, the burrowing owl will diligently collect its poo and proudly add it to the display. But there is wisdom in the owl’s apparent grossness. It can sit on its front verandah (well, in front of its burrow) all day long, and just patiently wait for its food to drop by. Because what does a burrowing owl actually love to eat? Dung beetles – who in turn, love to eat poo. By hauling all the poo home, the owls have guaranteed their own private, dung beetle home delivery service.

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PLANETARY POO-EATING CHAMPIONS Speaking of dung beetles, if you’re not standing knee-deep in poo right now, consider thanking them for your good fortune. Dung beetles are the superstars of the poo-eating world. They occur on all continents, except for Antarctica. Though they may be small, their appetite for eating and recycling poo makes them big players in ecosystems all over the world.

The movement of poo underground is important for the health of the local ecosystem. The poo acts as a fertiliser, improving soil health and providing nutrition for plants and the other animals that eat them. You’ll read more about the important roles of poo for ecosystems in Chapter 7.

More than 8000 dung beetle species are thought to live worldwide. Although each one has its own special poo interests, they’ll fall into one of three main types – dwellers, tunnellers or rollers. Dweller dung beetles just dive straight into their poo of choice and set up home inside it. Tunnellers prefer to dive down through their favoured filth and bury into the ground underneath. The male tunneller dung beetles will bring poo down to the female, who busies herself sorting the poo in the tunnels below. But for now we will focus on the roller dung beetles – mighty creatures who collect poo in a ball, and then roll it away to use elsewhere. Rollers are commonly seen transporting balls of poo of at least 50 times their bodyweight!

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The strongest dung beetle ever observed was a male roller dung beetle, Onthphagus taurus (onth-FAY-guss TOR-uss), which could push up to 1000 times its own weight. That’s the equivalent of a 30-kilogram person pushing five elephants! This mighty feat makes this dung beetle the world’s strongest animal (relative to its size). To make it even more impressive, the male roller dung beetles move these huge loads backwards, balancing on their front legs while pushing with their rear legs.

Just like large mammals, such as deer or elk, male roller dung beetles battle to win the affections of females. Some male dung beetles have a hornlike structure on their heads that they use pretty much like antlers, to fight with other males – and just like antlers, the larger the better. Once a male roller dung beetle has beaten his opponent, a female will show her approval by jumping on the victorious beetle’s ball of poo! But she doesn’t just hop up there for the view – this giant poo ball is a critical part of dung beetle courtship. Together, the two beetles usually bury the ball, and the female will lay her eggs in it before covering it with saliva and even more poo. When the baby dung beetles hatch, this delicious snack will be waiting for them.

THE BEETLES THAT SAVED AUSTRALIA Can you imagine how much poo would pile up without dung beetles? In the 1950s, Australians didn’t need to imagine – they were suffering from a problem that made everyday life disgusting. The country was covered in poo, and no-one knew what to do about it. The problem started when settlers introduced cows to Australia. We have more than 500 local, or endemic species of dung beetles – that is, species that are found here and nowhere else in the world. They have been busily munching on kangaroo, wombat and bandicoot poo for millions of years. But when the cows came, the native dung beetles didn’t have any interest in their giant, sloppy poo.

released across the country to give their Australian cousins a hand (well, a leg really) to break down the ocean of poo threatening to drown the country. Bornemissza’s work was greatly appreciated by the Australian public. He dedicated most of his scientific career to working with dung beetles, and even won a Medal of the Order of Australia for his efforts. As well as allowing Australians to eat outdoors again, his imported dung beetles improved the health of Australian ecosystems. By working the poo back into the soil, the beetles improved the soil’s health. This also kept waterways clearer of poo and reduced the spread of diseases. Three cheers for Bornemissza’s mighty beetles!

Today, Australia has about 30 million cattle, and each one of them produces about 12 cow pats a day. Over a year, that could mean more than a million hectares of splattery cow pat smothering the land.

And where there’s cow poo, there are flies. Millions of them. Once a fly has laid its eggs in fresh cow poo, up to 3000 new flies can hatch. Imagine this repeated every two weeks from every cow pat. That’s a lot of dirty little insect feet walking all over your picnic lunch! In fact, the flies got so bad that the government made it illegal to eat outdoors at restaurants to stop people getting sick. But in the late 1950s, entomologist George Bornemissza had a clever idea. He’d compared paddocks in Europe and Australia and had discovered what was missing down under – dung beetles that were adapted to cow poo. He suggested that foreign dung beetles could be imported and

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OTHER QUESTIONABLE EATING HABITS DOGS WILL TRY ANYTHING ONCE. SOMETIMES TWICE! For animals that we let sleep in our houses – and sometimes on our sofas or even in our beds – dogs are pretty revolting. And one of their least delightful habits is their often enthusiastic consumption of poo. Puppies can be the worst culprits. Like most babies, they often have no idea what’s appropriate to eat, and will put anything they find in their mouths. Also, they’ve probably watched their mother eat their droppings when they were tiny pups to keep her den clean, and so might think that this is what adult dogs do all the time. Adult dogs have plenty of reasons to snack on poo. Sometimes, they’re just hungry or bored, and see it as a handy snack. At other times, they may not be getting enough nutrition from their regular diet and might be looking for a few extra easy calories. Dogs also get particularly hungry if they have parasitic worms living in their guts that need feeding as well. And sometimes, they’ve just picked up naughty poo-snacking habits from other dogs. While these are all reasonable explanations, that doesn’t make your dog’s breath any sweeter when it leans in to give you a sloppy kiss!

Most dog owners will have also had the pleasure of watching their pet eat its own vomit. (Or even someone else’s. Dogs aren’t picky.) However gross this may initially appear, dogs might have more good reasons to eat vomit than you might think. Let’s take a closer look at this spewmunching phenomenon. If a dog wolfs down their food too fast, it can catch in their throat, causing them to gag and spit it straight out again. This food has only been chewed a bit – it never made it to the dog’s stomach. So, when it comes back out, all the good food smells are still on it. For the dog, this is a fantastic bonus – it gets to eat the same meal twice! Another reason dogs might not turn their noses up at a vomit meal is that sometimes, their mums feed them regurgitated food – just like wolves do. When wolves hunt, they leave the pups behind in the safety of the den. Often, the mother wolf or other members of the pack capture a meal far away. How do they get the meat back to the hungry pups? They eat as much as possible, carry it safely in their stomach back to the den, and then spew it back out for the pups. So, for a wolf, throwing up for their babies is really an act of love that ensures the pups’ survival.

A puppy eating poo isn’t a pretty picture, but puppies chewing other things are cute.

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EAT YOUR GREENS, OR ELSE Which would you rather eat – a plate full of Brussels sprouts, or some green slime you grew in your own armpit? Once you hear how sloths get their greens, those sprouts might start to look a lot more attractive. Sloths are among the world’s most extreme poopers – see Chapter 8 for the juicy details. But scientists have recently discovered that sloths are also surprisingly green-thumbed. Greeneverythinged, in fact! Sloths farm their own greens, but not on the ground. Instead, they grow it on their own fur – quite handy for an animal that spends most of its time in the trees! A sloth’s fur has two layers. As with many other mammals, the first layer of fur is a thin, soft coat that helps keep the sloth dry and warm. The second layer of their fur is more unusual – it’s thick, coarse and full of life!

Gross fact: Hagfish slither into the rotting bodies of dead fish via whatever hole they can find, and eat the fish’s carcass from the inside out until only the skin remains. They often eat so fast that the rotting flesh comes straight out of their butts undigested! For more hagfish grossness, see Chapter 8.

The outer sloth coat is an ecosystem in itself. Algae, fungi and bacteria flourish in the warmth of the fur, while tiny predators – cockroaches, roundworms and moth larvae – stalk through the hairy forest, playing hide and seek among the sloth’s greenish locks. The algae already provide one important service to the sloth – they give the sloth’s fur a nice green colour, the perfect camouflage for a slow life in the treetops. Some scientists think that sloths farm the algae for food by providing moths that help the algae grow. Sounds like a pretty gross way to get your vitamins – pass the Brussels sprouts please!

Gross fact: Cows don’t like to eat grass that’s too close to their poo. The area they avoid is called the ‘zone of repugnance’, and is about five times the size of the cow pat.

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Scientist profile:

DR BEN MOORE, KOALA ECOLOGIST HOW DID YOU BECOME A POO SCIENTIST, BEN? Before I became a poo scientist, I was a koala scientist. I really wanted to understand how koalas choose healthy, nutritious and delicious leaves to eat. As you may know, not everything that goes in an animal’s mouth gets used, and the stuff that’s left over is poo – so there’s a pretty direct connection between being a food scientist and being a poo scientist!

With a diet consisting mostly of eucalypt leaves, koala poo almost smells like mints!

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WHY IS POO SO IMPORTANT TO YOU? Poo can tell us so much about koalas and what they eat. We collect poo from koalas in zoos, koalas that we’ve caught and are looking after for a while, and even from the ground under trees in the bush, long after koalas have moved on. Then we bring it back to laboratory and do all sorts of things with it. We can look for pieces of undigested plants and plant DNA in the poo, and work out which types of trees koalas have been eating. We can look for nasty chemicals from the trees they eat, as well as the leftover nutrients that the koalas didn’t use, and learn a lot about how toxic or how nutritious the trees are.

Sometimes we give a koala a pill containing a type of biological marker that we can measure when the poo comes out the other end. The marker tells us how long it takes for gum leaves to travel from one end of a koala to the other. The answer is a very long time: about 48 hours. We also look at what type of bacteria are in a koala’s poo. This has helped us to understand the really important job that bacteria do in helping to break down tough gum leaves. Eucalyptus leaves have poor levels of nutrients, so we are studying how the bacteria help give koalas the energy they need.

PLEASE TELL US ONE MORE GROSS POO STORY! One thing that sounds pretty gross to us is the way that koala mums make sure their joeys get all the good gut bacteria they need. Just when joeys are first leaving the pouch, their mums start to produce a runny type of poo called pap. Pap is rich in good bacteria, and guess what the joeys do … they eat it! Who said medicine was meant to taste good?

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CHAPTER 3:

HOME, STINKY HOME All animals need a home. And many animals need to build their own. Some get quite creative, using all manner of leaves, sticks and stones to build themselves a cosy dwelling. But some are not content with a leafy hollow or nest of shredded bark to snooze in. When it comes to home sweet home, sometimes only poo will do.

BUILDING WITH POO One discerning creature that prefers poo as a building material is the ornate narrow-mouthed frog, Microhyla ornata (MY-kro-HY-lah or-NAHtah). Ecologists have discovered this frog, which lives in Sri Lanka, setting up house in the giant droppings of the endangered Asian elephant. Disgusting?! Perhaps to you. But think about this from the frog’s point of view. For them, elephant poo can be quite hot property. Ornate narrow-mouthed frogs are nocturnal. They generally spend their days snoozing in grass or leaf litter, coming out at night to look for something tasty to eat. So, scientists were surprised one day to find some of these frogs sheltering in a pile of elephant dung – a kind of high-rise frog a-poot-ment, if you will. No-one had ever noticed this behaviour before. These frogs are usually quite content living in grass or leaf litter. But in the place where that behaviour was observed, it was very hot and dry. Frogs are amphibians, and can breathe through their skin. They need to keep moist and spend most of their time in water or more humid (high moisture) environments, so they don’t dry out. In the hot, dry savannah where the elephants live, the frogs might have taken to the piles of poo to keep cool and comfortable. Elephant dung is also often full

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of half-digested bits of plant, as well as bugs and other tasty tidbits, providing snacks for the frogs in between snoozes. That pile of elephant poo can actually be a whole mini-ecosystem – providing habitat not only for frogs, but lots of different sorts of insects, fungi and bacteria.

RENOVATING WITH POO It’s not just frogs that take advantage of other animals’ poo for home building and decoration. Regular domestic honey bees, Apis mellifera (AY-pis mel-LIF-er-ra) do most of their foraging on flowers*. But not so their cousins, the stingless bees – a.k.a. the meliponines (mel-IPoh-neens). Stingless bees forage on all kinds of things, including dead, rotting bodies and piles of poo of all varieties. Scientists have watched these bees using some of the excrement they collect to build their nests. This helps to waterproof their homes and provides a smelly defence against potential predators.

*Don’t think that honey bees are all about flowers and sunshine. Scientists have also spotted them scavenging on human poo! Think about that as you spread honey on your toast!

HOUSEKEEPING WITH POO While it’s great to be able to use the poo of other animals for home renovation projects, sometimes it’s just easier to use your own. Termites are well-known munchers of wood. In the wild, this is a very valuable service – they chomp through wood and other plant parts, allowing nutrients to return to the soil for other organisms to use. However, this talent for chomping makes termites very unpopular with people. Of all the thousands of types of termites, the Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes blattodea (KOP-toeTERM-ees blat-oh-DEE-ah), is perhaps the most infamous. They chew through human houses, destroying walls and beams one munch at a time. In between stints of destroying human homes, Formosan subterranean termites busy themselves pooping out what are basically wood shavings. They mix this up with a bit of chewed wood, spit and dirt, and voila! The perfect termite nestbuilding material! This delightful wood–poo–dirt building mix is called carton. They also build shelter tubes, which are tunnels that connect separate parts of the nest. Thanks to the shelter tubes, the termites never have to go out into the open, keeping them safe from predators. To keep the insides of their nests and tunnels warm and moist, termites also smear the walls of their homes with even more poo! This should normally provide the perfect conditions for unhealthy fungi like mould and mildew to grow. But termite poo holds a surprising power – it contains bacteria that kill fungi, stopping it from infecting the nest and making the termites ill. Who knew poo could be so hygienic?

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Scientist profile:

DR KATE FRASER, MARINE ECOLOGIST DR KATE – WHAT DO YOU DO FOR WORK? As a marine ecologist, I spend a lot of time scuba diving and looking at plants and animals underwater. While I’m down there, I take notes using waterproof paper, and then use the things I learn to help people understand the life of the underwater world.

CAN YOU PLEASE CONFIRM OR DENY THE RUMOURS WE’VE HEARD ABOUT PARROTFISH SLEEPING IN THEIR OWN SNOT? The rumours are true! Sometimes I go diving after dark, because lots of animals behave differently at night. One time I was working on the Great Barrier Reef, looking carefully in cracks and crevices on the reef and under ledges. I found several soft, white bubbles under ledges. When I looked closer, I could see daisy parrotfish sound asleep inside them! The daisy parrotfish is also called the bullethead parrotfish, Chlorurus sordidus (klor-ROO-russ sor-DEE-duss).

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HOW AND WHY DO PARROTFISH MAKE THESE BAGS OF MUCUS? People used to think that parrotfish made these ‘sleeping bags’ to protect themselves from predators. But a clever researcher called Alexandra Grutter discovered that parrotfish are plagued by parasites called gnathiid (NATH-id) isopods. These tiny crustaceans attach to the parrotfish’s skin like ticks and suck their blood. During the day, small fish called cleaner wrasse keep the gnathiids at bay by picking them off the parrotfish and eating them. The cleaner wrasse set up ‘stations’ on the reef for all sorts of fish to visit. The fish queue up, conveniently forgetting about their predator–prey relationships, waiting

for the cleaner wrasse to clean them. The cleaner wrasse even clean in between the teeth of big fish, like sharks and groupers! But when the cleaner wrasse fall asleep at night, the parrotfish have no protection from the gnathiids. As soon as it gets dark, the parrotfish release mucus from glands in their gills to make their sleeping bags. The gnathiids can’t get through the snot bubble to attach to the parrotfish, which means they sleep better and are generally healthier. In the morning, the cleaner wrasse wake up and go back to eating gnathiids. They also eat the remnant mucus from the parrotfish sleeping bags, as it contains even more energy than gnathiids do! Even better, the mucus contains chemicals called amino acids that, when eaten, protect the cleaner wrasse from sunburn. That’s one helpful bag of snot.

WHAT OTHER MARINE SPECIES RELY ON SNOT TO SURVIVE UNDERWATER? Snot is everywhere on coral reefs! The corals themselves are covered in mucus that traps bacteria and tiny animals called zooplankton. Tiny, moving hairs known as cilia (SILL-ee-ah) then transport the mucus and trapped food to

the corals’ mouths. Some small crabs and shrimp live within the branches of hard corals, but are too big for the corals to eat. These critters eat the mucus and trapped food themselves. One type of coral (Acropora, a.k.a. staghorn coral) can produce 4.8 litres of snot per square metre, per day! Much of it washes away in currents and provides food for other animals on the reef. Speaking of using snot to catch food, many worm and snail species that live underwater spit out nets of mucus. The nets wave around, catching tiny zooplankton and other food. The worms and snails then suck the nets back in and eat them, as well as all the trapped food – yummy!

TELL US ABOUT YOUR GROSSEST FIELDWORK EXPERIENCE! Catching dugongs in Moreton Bay using the ‘cowboy’ technique was pretty gross. We chased them in our boat until they got tired, then leaped out and grabbed them. We then took samples of the dugongs’ skin and poo to analyse their DNA and diets. Dugongs are among the smelliest animals out there, with particularly stinky poo that gets all over researchers as they try to collect it.

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TERRITORIAL POOING Dogs are famous for their fabulous sense of smell. Their noses may be 10 000 to 100 000 times more sensitive than the average person’s! So perhaps it’s not surprising that dogs use stinky substances to communicate with one another. After a long night locked inside, you’d think your dog would be busting for a wee. But they often won’t empty their bladder all at once. For dogs and many other animals, wee is a valuable resource that they’ll often use to mark out the extent of their home range, one little squirt at a time. Known as territorial marking or scent marking, dogs wee on things to tell everyone else ‘This Yard is the Property of Fluffy!’, or ‘This Tree Belongs to Mr Woofles!’. They’ll usually try to wee as high up as they can – at dog-nose height – so that any canines passing by will clearly smell whose territory they’re passing into. (Also, the higher the wee, the bigger the other dogs may think Fluffy and Mr Woofles are!) But not all of this public peeing is about ownership. Sometimes, dogs are just leaving information for other dogs – a kind of doggy personal ad.

At other times, dogs might scent mark on objects (or other dogs!) if they are scared, or trying to show they’re not a threat. If you’ve ever had a puppy wee on you, it just wanted you to know that it really, really wanted to be friends! But generally, dogs will avoid dirtying the inside of their lairs with their own wee or poo. It’s not just hygienic – it can also be the difference between life and death. Mother dogs often eat the poo of their puppies, which keeps their dens clean and helps hide the pups from predators that might be attracted by the stink of puppy poo.

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Rhinoceroses also have a few smelly ways they make themselves at home. As well as marking the edges of their territories with urine (like dogs), they use poo as a sophisticated signalling device. White rhinos create latrines (a fancy word for a rhino public toilet) in various parts of their home range. From analysing the poo in these latrines, scientists have discovered that rhinos use them much like community noticeboards – leaving information for others about their age, sex, interest in reproducing and territorial claims. Ecologists think that rhinos find these smelly signs easier to read than visual cues, because their eyesight is quite poor.

Your size can also make a difference to how you choose to poo in your home territory. Generally speaking, for wild cats for example, the bigger the cat, the less likely it is to bury its poo. This is perhaps to be expected. When you’re a huge, fierce lion or tiger, who’s going to tell you off for relieving yourself wherever you want? No-one, that’s who. But if you’re a smaller cat, like a serval, you might not want to draw the attention of the local lion gang. They might eat you. In this instance, burying your poo is a smart move – especially if it’s close to where you and your kittens sleep. That way, hopefully the lions won’t even notice you’re there. Speaking of small cats, if you have a house cat, we hope they’ve learned how to bury their poo in a litter tray, or perhaps in the garden. Hiding their poo shows that they see you as the dominant ‘boss’ animal in the house. If they’re not burying it, it’s possible they think they’re in charge. Or, they may not have learned proper poo-etiquette as kittens, or they might even be unwell.

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GROSS MYSTERIES OF THE ANIMAL WORLD #313 – THE GREAT HOUSE CAT POO DASH Have you ever watched a cat exit its litter box? Tail up, at high speeds, they shoot from the scene of their poo crimes, zooming across the house with what looks like wild excitement. But why? Disappointingly, little proper science has been done into the reasons behind ‘cat poo zoomies’. But a few theories are doing the rounds. 1. Behavioural scientists suggest that cats may be instinctively getting away from their own smell, to avoid being attacked by predators. But as no-one has ever seen a wild cat doing this, the evidence here is slim. 2. The cat is trying to shake off any bits of poo that might still be stuck to its bum. This theory is both gross and unsubstantiated. 3. Perhaps the cat has some digestive issues. Vets say it might be a sign that the cat wants to get away from the discomfort of weeing or pooing. 4. The post-litter-tray dash is just the cat’s way of showing off. They’ve pooed in a box, and they want everyone to know about it. 5. Pooing feels great and the cat is celebrating. Both cats and humans have a nerve in their butts called the vagus nerve, that when stimulated (say, by pooing) can make the poo-er feel happy, excited or relieved. Poo experts have dubbed this feeling ‘poo-phoria’ (like euphoria, but smellier). Although there is no evidence to support this in cats, this is our favourite theory so far.

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BOTANICAL TOILET BLOCK Most carnivorous plants eat insects to meet their nutritional needs. But a giant pitcher plant in the highlands of Borneo decided to diversify its diet – by snacking on bat poo! The plants supplement their insect diet with the poo of Hardwicke’s woolly bat, Kerivoula hardwickii (ker-ree-VOO-lah hardWICK-ee-eye). The pitcher bounces the bats’ echolocation sounds right back at them, making the plants easy to find in the crowded jungle canopy. Once the bats have identified a suitable snoozing spot, they land on the rim of the pitcher and wriggle on down, treating it like a private hotel room. While they relax in their private suite, the bats will often do a poo – which the plant greatly appreciates. It’s actually counting on this – it gets up to a third of the nitrogen it needs from the bat tenants!

‘I’d like a room with an ensuite bathroom, please.’ A Hardwicke’s woolly bat inspects a promising pitcher plant.

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CHAPTER 4:

LOVE IS GROSS Animals will go to surprisingly unpleasant lengths to maintain their social circles, secure a mate and raise a family.

FITTING IN WITH THE CROWD Sugar gliders are small, cute, fluffy, flying possums. You might expect them to smell like flowers. But the truth is far grosser. Sugar gliders live in groups, often all snoozing together in the same tree hollow. They are also territorial, meaning that they don’t appreciate strangers sneaking into their group. But in the darkness of a hollow, how can you be sure the sugar glider you’re snuggling up against is one of your gang? Simple – take a good sniff. Each sugar glider family has one or two dominant males – basically, the dads of the group. Sugar glider dads label their family members by rubbing scent on them. They use two types of scent glands for this kind of marking – one is found in a diamond-shaped bald patch on top of their heads, and the other is on their chests. The scent allows the dads to identify their family members in the dark. Both male and female gliders also have a separate set of scent glands – in their butts! They use this scent, sometimes in combination with a bit of wee, to mark their territory, as well as other things they feel belong to them. So the next time your parents encourage family unity by trying to convince you to wear matching t-shirts, remember – if you were a sugar glider, it could be so much worse.

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A baby sugar glider. Cute? Yes. But stinky? Also yes.

IF WE WERE REALLY FRIENDS, YOU’D SPEW IN MY MOUTH Perhaps even worse than being a sugar glider, you could be unlucky enough to experience life as a carpenter ant. Like many other social insects, carpenter ants routinely throw up in one another’s mouths to exchange food between colony members. Entomologists call this trophallaxis (troh-fal-AX-iss), but you’d be forgiven for calling it gross. Apparently spewing into other adults’ mouths, as well as into the mouths of larvae, is a great way of bonding with your community. Entomologists have also discovered that it’s not only food that the carpenter ants are throwing up. Mixed in with the food spew is a cocktail of chemical signals and proteins, which allow ants to recognise their nest mates. It may also even control how fast and healthily larvae grow into adults, determining the size of the whole colony. That’s some influential vomit!

THE POWERFULLY PERSUASIVE POO OF THE NAKED MOLE RAT Speaking of powerfully gross, have you met the naked mole rat? In some ways, these strange little African creatures are more like insects than mammals. Rarely seen above ground, and nearly blind, naked mole rats live in large, underground colonies of up to 300 animals. And each colony is ruled over by one almighty queen. Naked mole rats dig tunnels underground, creating purpose-built chambers for sleeping and food storage, as well as one large chamber that acts as their public toilet. This all sounds fairly hygienic – until you learn what they do in there. Because naked mole rats are nearly blind, colony members rely on their sense of smell to identify other members of their group. Having the wrong smell could have you torn to shreds by hideous, yellow fangs! To make sure everyone smells alike, naked mole rats deliberately roll around in their shared toilet chamber, coating themselves in the stench of their own excrement. As if this weren’t bad enough, while they’re at it, they sometimes snack on the faeces found within the chamber. This second digestion allows them to extract maximum nutrition from the fibrous plant roots that make up most of their diet. Like ants or bees, individual naked mole rats belong to different groups within the colony, known as castes (KARSTS). Worker rats are in charge of digging tunnels, finding food and other naked mole rat housework. Warrior rats fight off intruders, whether they be marauders from other colonies, or predators like white-lipped snakes and sand boas that are foolish enough to enter the naked mole rat domain. Breeder rats are in charge of, well, making babies. And the largest of them all is the naked mole rat queen.

Sure, naked mole rats look weird, but wait until you hear what they do with their poo!

Weighing sometimes twice as much as her smaller minions, the queen is the only female allowed to reproduce. And once she does, like true royalty, you better believe she won’t be looking after those babies herself. Ecologists have discovered that by feeding her female servants with her own poo, the queen essentially brainwashes them into becoming full-time babysitters. Hormones in the queen’s poo cause the lower-caste females to care for the royal babies as if they were their own, feeding them and keeping them safe. All hail the queen!

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LOVE STINKS

OTTERS AND THEIR UNSPEAKABLE JELLY Eurasian otters are cute little things. Famous for their playful natures and acrobatic antics, otter families can often be seen happily clicking, whistling and chirping at one another to communicate. But otters also have quieter, stinkier ways of communicating with and identifying their family members. These methods have caused some scientists to brand otters as ‘aggressively malodorous’ (how rude!). Otters like to leave scent marks, extruded from glands in their furry little bottoms, in the form of what scientists call anal jelly, smears or tars (ew!). They also leave spraints, which is a fancy word for otter poo, on obvious landmarks like large rocks on riverbanks. These stinky secretions help otters keep tabs on the goings-on within their social groups. From sniffing any of these manky markings, another otter can tell who it belongs to, whether they are male or female, how long ago they were in the area, how old they are – and perhaps most importantly, whether or not they are looking for love, baby.

Never shake hands with a capuchin monkey – you never know what they’ve been doing with them!

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Capuchin monkeys take attracting a mate one step further. Many species of monkeys have been caught ‘urine washing’ – peeing on their own hands, and then rubbing it into their feet and fur. Scientists weren’t sure why they would do something so gross, but recent studies of capuchins have shed some light on this stinky subject. When a female capuchin starts looking for a male to father her new monkey babies, the alpha (or top) males in the group take a wee-wash twice as often as they normally do. This suggests that they might be trying to communicate something about themselves by wafting hormones like testosterone about in their wee. Extra wee means an extra strong scent for the lady monkeys to inhale – and perhaps, a particularly pungent bouquet might be the thing to help her choose ‘the one’.

But why limit yourself to weeing on your own body? Lobsters show their feelings by weeing on their potential love interest! A lobster’s bladder is situated in its head, underneath the brain. When a female lobster gets a whiff of a suitably smelling male lobster, she approaches the entrance to his burrow and courts him by weeing on his face. Eventually, if the male is convinced by what he smells, he will welcome her into his lair to continue the courtship process.

However, hippopotamuses might just take the prize for the grossest attempts to win love and affection. Spinning their stumpy tails like hairy propellers, male hippos mark their territory and advertise for a mate by splattering a mixture of wee and poo up to 10 metres away. Remember this if you ever have the chance to stand near a hippo at the zoo! Scientists call this behaviour ‘dung showering’, which doesn’t sound very hygienic at all, if you ask us. And if a lady hippo is attracted to a particular bull hippo? She simply turns around, points her bum at him, and aims her own dung shower at his face – how romantic!

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PARENTING WITH POO Raising a family can be tough. But some animals use the power of poo to make parenting a little easier. An African bird called the double-banded courser, Rhinoptilus africanus (rye-NOP-til-us af-ree-CARNus), lives on sparse, dry plains in the semi-desert. There is very little plant cover to hide their single eggs from possible predators. So, in an act of cunning camouflage, the double-banded courser hides them in plain sight, among piles of antelope poop. How does this work? Because their eggs also look just like pieces of poo!

Warty leaf beetles from the group of species known as Neochlamisus (NEE-oh-klam-EYE-suss) are sometimes said to resemble caterpillar frass. While other animals might find this comparison insulting, it suits the warty leaf beetles just fine. So much so, they decorate their babies in a matching poo theme to protect them. When a female warty leaf beetle lays her eggs on a plant, she carefully crafts a case that covers each egg using her own poo, so that potential predators can’t see the delicious egg snack inside.

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Crusty poo or precious egg? The double-banded courser likes to keep potential egg thieves guessing!

Some warty leaf beetles take their poo-case construction even further. They build in a special pocket at the top of the case filled with itchy plant hairs called trichomes (TRY-combs). The hairs form a booby trap for any predator that dares breach the protective poo-shell! Once the larvae hatch, they add their own poo to the case, expanding it as they grow. When they’re eventually ready to leave the protection of their poo hut, they simply gnaw a neat circle into the roof, pop the top and fly away.

In the rainforests of south and south-east Asia, great hornbill mothers take their parenting commitments seriously, engaging in some revoltingly suspect home renovation activities. Once a female hornbill chooses a suitable nesting hollow, she seals herself and her eggs inside, using her own poo to close off all but the tiniest of slits in the entrance. This protects her from predators, while also stopping other hornbills from booting her out of her chosen lair.

Gross fact: Common swift chicks squeeze out poos in little mucous sacs. The parents usually clean up by throwing the sacs out of the nest. But when the chicks are small, the parent swifts are too busy to catch enough food for themselves. So they’ll sometimes eat their kids’ poo bundles as a nutritious snack!

While she’s stuck in there, with not a lot to do but sit around, she often slips into something a little more comfortable. In a move that scientists call a simultaneous moult, she drops all of her feathers at once. Being temporarily featherless and sealed in her home, a hornbill mother can’t just duck out to find food. And as there are no takeaway deliveries to the forest, the hornbill father is kept very busy supplying the increasingly large amounts of food required by his mate and their growing family. He feeds the female figs and other tidbits through the slit entrance to the nest. Rather unfortunately, the entrance for food is also the exit for waste. The female and her chicks jettison their poo out of the slit – which is a bit like being hand-fed your meal while you sit in the toilet bowl! When the chicks are a little bigger, the female will tear her way out of the nest. Once Mum’s gone, the chicks gather up their own poo, and seal themselves back in again until they are big enough to leave.

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FLESH FLOWERS

Gross fact:

Just like animals, some plants impersonate gross things to ensure the survival of their species. The huge titan arum, a.k.a. the corpse flower Amorphophallus titanium (ay-MORE-foFAL-luss ty-TAY-nee-um), stinks up the forests of Sumatra in Indonesia. There, it does its best to impersonate a hunk of rotten flesh.

Gross things can be rare, precious – and expensive! Ambergris (AM-buh-grees) is a highly sought-after substance that is often called whale vomit, even though it comes from a whale’s gut and is probably closer to poo. And what’s it used for? To add that extra-special ‘something’ to the world’s most expensive perfumes! How romantic …

The titan arum does this by smelling generally rancid, emitting a cocktail of whiffy chemicals usually associated with dead things. It’s also an unappealing off-purple, a bit like the colour of rotting animal flesh. The flower can even heat itself to roughly the same temperature as human blood, further exciting carnivorous flies, beetles and other insects looking for a juicy feed. They land on the huge flower, only to be disappointed to find a sneaky plant, and not the deliciously dead animal they were searching for. As the insects fly away in what we can only imagine to be complete disgust, they take with them the flower’s pollen. As they journey through the forest, they unwittingly pass on the corpse flower’s pollen to others, keeping the species alive.

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CHAPTER 5:

GROSSNESS AS SELF-DEFENCE Living in the wild can be scary and tough. Unless you’re a top predator, something, somewhere not too far away, probably wants to eat you. To survive, wild animals must defend themselves. Some do it with speed by running away quickly, like a gazelle. Some wear their protection, like a turtle’s strong shell, or an echidna’s spines. But others have developed rather odd, and often downright disgusting, adaptations to avoid becoming somebody else’s next meal.

WHEN IT PAYS TO LOOK LIKE POO Sometimes, the best way to remain invisible to predators is to choose a disgusting disguise. Take the small bird-dropping spider, Arkys curtulus (Ah-KISS KER-chu-luss). You may be unsurprised to learn that with a name like that, it looks like bird poo. While normally it’s not such a privilege to look like poo, this clever mimicry allows the spider to live out in the open. As few spider-eating animals are interested in eating bird poo, this disguise offers the bird-dropping spider a sort of cloak of invisibility. Potential predators, such as birds, generally avoid eating their own poo and so pass the spiders by without a second thought. This isn’t the only trick the bird-dropping spider has up its metaphorical sleeves – it also disguises itself by smell. Its odour closely resembles that of female moth pheromones, which male moths find irresistible. But when the male moths come looking for love, they are met by a hungry spider, and find themselves made into dinner instead.

Bird-dropping spider

Other spiders take their commitment to poo camouflage even further, accessorising their webs with their outfits. The orb-weaving spider Cyclosa ginnaga (sy-KLO-sah jin-NAH-ga) builds a fancy construction that looks just like a bird dropping in the middle of its web. Then it sits itself onto or near it, waiting.

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The bird-dropping spider, through the eyes of a bird, looks just like their own poo.

Both the spider’s body and its web decoration look identical to bird poo through the eyes of potential predators, such as wasps. This clever accessorising allows the spider to sit out in the open, ready to catch its prey without being seen by either by its predators or potential prey.

Dressing up as poo isn’t just for spiders. The viceroy caterpillar Limenitis archippus (LIM-en-EYE-tuss ar-KIPP-uss) also disguises itself as a pile of bird poo. Most caterpillars hide themselves from birds by hanging out underneath leaves. But the viceroy stays on top of leaves where real bird poo would be. These caterpillars have adapted both the way they look and the way they behave to survive. Nobody asks a bird poo what it’s doing on top of a leaf, so the viceroy caterpillar is free to munch out in the open, unbothered by birds.

THROWING PREDATORS OFF THE SCENT Imagine you pooed in the places where you spend most of your time, and never cleaned up. Soon, your bedroom, your school desk, or your seat at the kitchen table would all be pretty whiffy. Your poo would act as a stinky scent beacon for anyone looking for you. For wild animals, that’s dangerous, because predators often find their prey by smell. It’s hard to hide when you stink so much! Silver-spotted skipper caterpillars, Epargyreus clarus (ee-PAR-jy-RE-uss KLAR-uss) have found a rather unusual, but effective, way to protect their nests. They can catapult their frass vast distances away. And not just far enough to get them out of the nest – they can throw them a whopping 1.5 metres! For a caterpillar, that’s a massive distance – about 40 times their body length, which is surely a Poo-lympic record! If you are 1.3 metres tall, that would be like a 50-metre throw out of your bumhole! Scientists discovered that the caterpillars use their blood pressure to shoot their poo, and that the older the caterpillar, the further the frass flies. When the researchers wrote about this behaviour for an important journal, they named it ‘ballistic defecation’. If that doesn’t make you want to become a scientist, we don’t know what will!

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WHALE POO-NADO! At the other end of the animal size spectrum, sperm whales have been spotted using their poo to confuse predators – as well as unlucky divers. In 2015, snorkellers witnessed a whale-poo event previously little known to science. As they swam near a large sperm whale, they noticed it was beginning to poo. So far, so normal. Whales often poo before taking a deep dive: see Chapter 7 for more details of why this is important for the planet’s climate.

But this time, the whale didn’t dive immediately. The snorkellers watched, confused but interested, as the huge beast stayed on the surface, continuing to vent its bowels before spinning in circles, bobbing up and down, waving the poo with its tail in all directions. This went on for several minutes. The snorkellers’ interest changed to horror as the crystal-clear blue water around them became as cloudy as chocolate milk. Despite the grossness, they could not turn away, but hung there in amazement as the poo filled their eyes, mouths and ears, soaking their wetsuits with whale excrement. One of them even took an astonishing video of this 30-metre poo cloud, which they dubbed a ‘poo-nado’. Despite being the largest toothed whales on the planet and fearsome predators in their own right, sperm whales are sometimes hunted by pods of orcas, a.k.a. killer whales. Perhaps the power of a poo-nado might make an orca think twice about choosing a sperm whale for its next meal!

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WEE SHOULDN’T FIGHT – YOU KNOW I’LL WIN Lots of animals use urine to communicate with others (see Chapter 3 for more on this). But some animals’ wee is so powerful, it can determine the outcome of a fight – or even stop one from happening in the first place. As you read back in Chapter 4, a lobster’s bladder sits right underneath its brain, and they have a nozzle right under their eyes that allows them to wee out of their faces. When male lobsters fight, they often wee on one another. Now scientists think they know why. When one Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus (PAN-new-LEER-uss AR-gus) fights another, they pee on or near their opponent’s face, using their gills to waft the wee towards each other. Scientists noticed that the bigger, stronger, fitter lobsters peed more than their opponents. Often, just smelling the wee of the dominant lobster was enough to convince a smaller lobster that a physical fight just wasn’t worth it. In weeing near one another, the lobsters send chemical signals telling their opponents just how dangerous they are – effectively avoiding the need for physical fisticuffs. What powerful wee!

SMELL MY POWER

STAND BACK – OR I’LL SPEW! Birds are particularly fond of using their vomit as a disgusting, yet effective, form of self-defence. When chicks of the Eurasian roller Coracias garrulus (kor-ASS-ee-us GA-rool-uss) have been left alone and get frightened, they vomit a foul-smelling, orange liquid all over their nest. They also spew all over themselves – which is apparently enough to deter the most persistent of predators. The vomitous smell also warns the chicks’ parents of potential danger when they return to the nest, making it a particularly nasty way of communicating. Adult turkey vultures, Cathartes aura (kath-AR-tees OR-rah), also use vomit to defend themselves when threatened while nesting. They spew up a foul-smelling slop of the partially digested, rotten flesh of whatever dead animal they last feasted upon. The stench of this awful mess is enough to keep most intruders away. But if they still persist in bothering the turkey vultures, would-be attackers may find themselves blinded by projectile vomit from the birds. Bird spew can even be deadly at times. The northern fulmar, Fulmarus glacialis (full-MAR-uss glay-seeARL-iss), spews stomach oils on any unwelcome bird visitors. As fulmars eat fish and all sorts of stinky rubbish they find lying around, the smell of this nasty oil is bad enough. However, it also destroys the protective covering on the other bird’s feathers. Without this protective layer, the unlucky bird can easily drown or die of cold in chilly waters. Who knew vomit could be so murderous?

Using similar tactics as the lobsters, cute little ring-tailed lemurs use nasty odours to communicate their fighting skills. The males will ‘stink fight’ by wafting scent at each other. This is a much safer way to fight than with teeth and claws, which can cause serious injuries. May the stinkiest lemur win!

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DON’T MAKE ME BLEED ON YOU! The prize for the bravest form of gross selfdefence should probably go to the greater short-horned lizard, Phrynosoma hernandesi (FRY-no-SO-ma her-NAN-dess-ee). These little desert lizards rely mostly on their camouflage for protection. But once a predator spots them, the lizard may try to bleed their way out of trouble.

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You see, greater short-horned lizards can shoot blood out of their eyes – straight into the mouths of their much larger predators. They only use this form of defence as a last resort, against four-legged predators like coyotes, kit foxes and bobcats. Interestingly, they almost never use it against pesky humans that might be picking them up for scientific studies. The blood they shoot out is horribly bitter and makes the predator gag and drool, spitting out their would-be snack. It doesn’t have the same effect on humans – apparently some researchers out there have actually tried it!

SURVIVAL OF THE STINKIEST Smelling awful is a surprisingly common form of self-defence in the animal world. Most people have heard of the skunk’s outrageous stink. They squirt a liquid out of their butts that smells like raw onions and can hit you in the face from 2 metres away! And in your own backyard, you may also have met some offensively whiffy millipedes, whose lethal cyanide gas farts can kill a mouse. But have you heard of the hoatzin, Opisthocomus hoazin (oh-PIZ-thowe-COMB-uss ho-AR-zinn)? Also known as the stinkbird, this extravagant-looking bird of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins looks a bit like a cross between a dinosaur and a chicken. Its chicks have weird, hooked claws on their wings, which help them to climb. When it comes to the way it digests its food, though, the hoatzin is more like a cow. This is actually linked to why the hoatzin smells so bad.

Hoatzins are the last of an ancient line of birds. A bit like cows, sheep or goats, hoatzins digest their food in their enlarged oesophagus (ee-SOF-ah-guss) and crop, instead of in their stomach, thanks to the help of millions of bacteria. They are the only bird in the world that does this. Hoatzins largely eat leaves, which can only be broken down through fermentation by bacteria. This explains why the birds smell so bad – a bit like cow farts. Apparently, they also taste like cow poo! This has its advantages, because people who would normally happily catch and eat such a slow-moving bird leave them in peace.

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Similarly stinky is the natty-looking Eurasian hoopoe, Upupa epops (yu-POO-pah EE-pops). Like many birds, hoopoes have a preening gland at the base of their tail. The gland is normally used to create oils that the birds wipe through their feathers to keep them in good order. But when breeding season arrives for the hoopoe, the female’s preening gland swells up massively. It then begins to ooze a revoltingly stinky, darkbrown liquid that smells like rotting meat. The female bird proceeds to smear this gunk all through her feathers, which makes them smell awful, but keeps them looking lovely, waterproof and flexible. Scientists have just discovered that this stinky fluid also contains a type of good bacteria, which eat a different, nasty bacteria that would otherwise destroy the birds’ feathers. Once the female has laid her eggs, she covers them with the mucky liquid too. And when a baby hoopoe hatches out of its filth-smeared egg, it develops its own form of self-defence. From six days of age, the chick can turn to face a predator and squirt them in the face with its own foulsmelling poo! Queensland’s beautiful golden-tailed geckos, Strophurus taenicauda (STROF-urr-uss tay-nikOW-dah) also use their foul odour to defensive advantage. When faced by a hungry bird, these little lizards turn and squirt a nasty-smelling, but otherwise harmless, brownish-yellow or orange liquid at their attackers. This is often enough to save the geckos from birds, but sadly, isn’t always effective against roaming cats or dogs.

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Gross fact: Sometimes, animals don’t have to create their own foul substances to protect themselves. Some birds, especially those living in urban areas, have been spotted collecting cigarette butts and bringing them back to their nests. This behaviour surprised researchers, until they discovered that the more cigarette butts there were in a nest, the fewer parasites could survive to bite the birds and their chicks. Just goes to show how nasty cigarettes really are!

Eurasian hoopoe

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Scientist profile:

CAITLIN HENDERSON, SPIDER SPECIALIST WE HAVE TALKED A LOT ABOUT GROSS THINGS ANIMALS DO, BUT WHAT’S THE GROSSEST THING INSECTS DO? The GROSSEST thing insects do? That’s a hard one because they are SO GROSS and yet so wonderful at the same time. I think one of the absolutely most terrible things is how termites feed each other … from their bums. This is called proctodeal trophallaxis, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘bum food’. By doing this, the termites transfer microbes that help them digest their diet of wood. I guess you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

HAVE YOU ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED IN BUGS? I was brought up in a world full of bugs! My dad and uncle were both really interested in bugs, particularly spiders, and as a kid I was always out helping them find things in the bush.

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I still remember the first time I found a spider that my dad missed – I was so proud! It was a badge huntsman, Neosparassus diana (nee-oh-spa-RASS-uss dy-ANN-ah), which is a group of spiders I am now researching.

DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE BUG? I am sorry to the rest of the bugs, but I absolutely love spiders the most. They are endlessly fascinating – and they make their own rope! It’s hard to pick a favourite spider, but I love huntsmen and orbweavers, and you can’t go past the fringed jumping spider (Portia spp.).

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO SEE INTERESTING BUGS? Bugs are almost EVERYWHERE! That means they’re easy for everyone to see, and they’re also extremely important, because they make up the bulk of our wildlife. Any time you go out into a natural area with plants around you, you are bound to find some bugs. The important thing to know is that there’s a day shift and a night shift! If you go to the same place at night with a torch, even in your backyard, you’ll see completely different species.

WHAT’S THE GROSSEST PART OF YOUR JOB? I’m pretty lucky, because bugs are generally a lot less gross than larger animals, in terms of the smells and what they can spread all over you. Some of them are pretty slimy, like slugs and snails, and the sticky mucus can be hard to wash off. I also often get used as a bug toilet, because many bugs get rid of their waste when they are disturbed. Some spiders have hit me with their

poo from a metre away! And lots of bugs vomit up a gross fluid to deter predators, which isn’t very pleasant. It’s not as bad as it sounds, because they are very small. And some bugs even have really lovely smelling defensive chemicals – one type of stick insect shoots you with peppermint perfume!

ANY OTHER GROSS ANECDOTES FOR US? As part of my job, I have to collect bugs to bring back for research or to keep live for display. I’ve spent a lot of time in tropical rainforests – breeding grounds for parasites. More times than I can count, I have caught a really exciting spider or praying mantis and brought it back with me, only to watch in horror the next day as an enormous worm burst from its abdomen, uncoiled into the enclosure and left the poor host dead on the ground! These Gordian worms, which can reach 30 centimetres in length, end their life cycle in water. This means they emerge from the host as soon as you give it a little spray of water to drink. By this time, the worms have eaten the host from the inside. Very gross!

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CHAPTER 6:

POO DETECTIVES If you’ve managed to read this far, you’ll know there’s so much more to poo than meets the eye – and the nostrils! Many scientists, especially doctors, veterinarians and ecologists, have understood the power of poo for a long time. Doctors and vets often look at poo to assess patient health. Ecologists are excited about poo for a different reason – it can help them learn more about animals and the environments they live in.

SNOOPING INTO SECRET ANIMAL BUSINESS Poo contains a surprising wealth of information, which can be a smelly goldmine for an ecologist. Poo is super-useful when the animals that produce it are hard to find. For example, many prey animals keep a low profile, to avoid being seen and eaten. Predators also try to stay out of sight, to increase their chances of catching a bite to eat. Animals can also be hard to find as they become increasingly rare.

This pile of cubic poos was left behind by a common wombat.

Humans have completely changed the face of the planet, and many scientists say we are now living in an era called the Anthropocene (an-THROP-oh-seen). This term is taken from the ancient Greek words for human and recent, or new. In this new era, much of the world has been directly built by and for humans. And a lot of the things we build – cities, big farms with huge paddocks and no trees – just aren’t so good as habitat for wild animals. When animals start to lose places to live in, their numbers drop. They can even become endangered – and therefore much harder for scientists to find. Once animals become rare, or if they are elusive (good at hiding), the best way to track them can be by finding their poo, often called ‘scats’ in the scientific world. And this is exactly what some ecologists do when they’re trying to find a wild animal’s habitat.

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Stinky spotted-tailed quoll scats are often stuffed with fur and bits of crunched-up bone.

Many animals poo a lot – especially herbivores and folivores (animals who eat mostly leaves). Take the koala: each koala produces about 100 poo pellets every day of the year! Imagine the time they would spend on the toilet! (Luckily for koalas, they just poo straight from the tree – saves them heaps of time looking for a public toilet.)

WHOSE POO? Where to start with your poo detective work? Start by looking at the shape, size and smell of the poo. Can you see any bits of other stuff in it?

Animals that use their poo to mark the boundaries of their territory deposit it in very obvious places. Wombats, for example, are quite gymnastic pooers, squeezing out their cubic scats on top of rocks and logs. This kind of show-off toilet behaviour is great for ecologists studying animals that are difficult to track. Of course, you need to be able to connect the poo to the pooer. That takes training, not to mention a flair for detective work. But with a little persistence, and good observational skills, you too can become a poo expert!

Gross fact: Scientists often use thermal cameras to find animals that are too hard for us to see. Thermal cameras detect warm things within the environment. And nothing gets past them – even animals pooing and peeing. Talk about an invasion of privacy!

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STICKY NOTE: It’s not a great idea to touch poo with your bare hands. Faeces can carry parasites, bacteria or diseases. If you’re examining a scat, always put some plastic gloves on first, and maybe use some tweezers or tongs to pick it up. If you unexpectedly find some interesting poo, you can use always use a couple of twigs as if they were chopsticks!

Herbivores have very grassy poo, which doesn’t smell as unpleasant as carnivore poop. Some folivores, such as koalas, even have relatively pleasant-smelling poo – reminiscent of the eucalyptus leaves that form the bulk of their diet. Carnivores have much smellier poo than herbivores do. Just think how nasty your cat’s poo smells compared with guinea pig poo! Carnivore scats also often contain visible bits and pieces of the animals they’ve eaten – parts that are hard to digest, like shells, bones, teeth or fur.

Echidna poos are often sparkly, due to the shiny shells of insects they’ve eaten.

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Looking at omnivore poo can be a great way to tell what these plant and animal eaters have been snacking on. Foxes are particularly adventurous eaters, and their diets change with their location and the seasons. A coastal fox, for instance, might eat lots of crabs and poop out lots of crushed crab shells. If a fox has been eating lots of rodents, their scats often contain the hair and tiny bones of rats or mice (and the bones can even tell scientists exactly what type of rodent it was). Foxes also munch on weedy blackberries, spreading the plant’s seeds through their poo, or on pandanus seeds, which look like little bunches of grapes when pooped out. Some animals have especially peculiar poo. We mentioned the cubic poos of wombats earlier – their squarish shape makes it easier for them to be stacked on top of rocks as a form of communication between wombats. Echidna scats are smooth, sausage-like and often very sparkly, reflecting their diet of shiny-winged ants, beetles and termites. Ecologists can also make discoveries about animals using other clues left behind in the environment. This might include animal tracks, hair or feathers, special diggings or nest mounds, regurgitated pellets from birds, and scratches or chew marks on trees. These types of clues are called indirect signs. So, the next time you go for a walk and step in an unknown poo, don’t think of it as a disaster for your shoes – think of it as a particularly smelly clue!

CONSERVATION-DETECTION DOGS Animal poo and spew might be easier to find than the animals themselves, but even these signs are not always obvious. Scats can easily be hidden on the ground among leaves, shrubs and dirt. Sure, some poos, spews and wee are a bit smelly, but only if your nose is right up close to them. Unless, of course, you’re a conservation-detection dog! You might have met a quarantine-detection dog before – they are often working at the airport or on the ferry, sniffing your bags to see if you’ve got any forbidden fruits or food products. Conservationdetection dogs are a bit different. They’re trained to find clues in the outside world to help ecologists learn more about the environment. And the clues they look for can be quite gross!

Other dogs on Maya’s team are trained for different koala targets. Some look for koalas that might need to be rescued for treatment, either because they’re sick or have been injured in bushfires. Koalas have been having a hard time lately – a lot of their habitat has been lost to land clearing to build houses, or in huge bushfires. Luckily for these endangered animals, Maya and her poo-sniffing friends are on the job!

MAYA, THE KOALA-POO SNIFFER DOG Maya the border collie is part of the Detection Dogs for Conservation Program at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She is trained to run around the bush with her handler (author Romane Cristescu!), sniffing for koala poo. When Maya finds a eucalyptus-scented pellet, she drops to the ground, and points to the poo with her nose. Her reward for finding this valuable object? Playtime with her favourite toy – a tennis ball! The ecologists who work with Maya use the pellet’s location to help them map koala habitat. As animals that move around a surprising amount, it’s handy that they leave these smelly business cards for detection dogs to find. The scientists can also learn other things from the scats – including whether or not the koalas are ill.

Maya takes her koala-poo sniffing work very seriously!

DIO, THE WHALE-POO SNIFFER DOG Finding poo on land is one thing. But finding it in a huge area of ocean is something else entirely. Dio, a blue heeler cross, works with scientists in Puget Sound in the United States to sniff out orca poo. He stands at the front of the boat while his handler holds his leash. When he gets a whiff of orca poo, he pulls her in the direction of the odour. Orca poo is almost the same colour as sea water, and smells a bit like salmon. It’s much harder to find than sperm whale poo, which can be brown to bright orange – and apparently, smells absolutely disgusting! Even if Dio isn’t pulling on his lead, his handler is always watching him for signs. Something as subtle as a twitch of a nostril can mean that Dio is on the scent. His handler directs the boat driver to follow the trail, and when they finally find the precious poo, they scoop it out of the water using a jar on a stick. Then they take it back to the laboratory to be studied later. Like Maya, Dio’s reward for his hard work is a play with his ball.

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SECRETS OF THE FOSSIL POOS … Most fossils you might’ve seen are probably of animal bones or skin. But of course, there is another, grosser type of animal fossil – the coprolite! Coprolites are the ancient remains of animal poos. Normal fossils can tell us where the animals lived, but only coprolites can reveal their diet. A dinosaur coprolite can tell us what plants the dinosaur ate, which tells us what kind of ecosystem it lived in – a forest, a swamp or perhaps a grassland. Some coprolites even contain intact (unchewed) insects – perhaps the ancient ancestors of dung beetles today!

This is ‘Barnum’, a recently discovered Tyrannosaurus rex coprolite from South Dakota, USA. It’s recognised as the world’s largest coprolite by Guinness World Records.

This coprolite is famous for its spiral shape. It was found in England and dates from the Jurassic Period.

SCIENCE BREAKTHROUGH – FOSSILISED BUG FOUND IN FOSSILISED POO!

This is ‘Precious’, another famous coprolite found in the USA, and one of the most well preserved in the world. It would be over 254 millimetres if it wasn’t bent.

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For the first time ever, scientists have discovered a brand new species of bug by x-raying a fossilised dinosaur poo! The bug’s new name reflects this – Triamyxa coprolithica. Researchers think that a silesaur ate this bug, and hundreds of its friends, during the Triassic period, 230 million years ago.

… AND THE FOSSIL SPEWS! Similar to coprolites, fossilised owl pellets help us learn what the owl ate, and therefore, what animals were present at different times in the distant past. Scientists have found caves in Utah in the United States that owls have been living in for the last 13 000 years! Every time an owl spewed up a pellet after eating, it fell to the bottom of the cave. As the pellets piled up, the newer ones squashed the old ones, which eventually turned into fossils. This kind of thing makes scientists silly with excitement. By looking at the pellets, they can study what animals have been in the area for the last 13 000 years – that’s one longterm, gross science project!

GLITTERY POOS SHOW WHOSE IS WHOSE Zookeepers like to keep a close eye on their animals – and they often keep tabs on the animals’ health by examining their poo. But how do you keep track of whose poo is whose in a multi-animal enclosure? For the lions at Victoria’s Werribee Zoo, the problem is solved with glitter! When each lion is fed their meat, their keepers first sprinkle the meal with a particular colour of edible glitter. So, when the keepers pick up the lion droppings at the end of the day, they can send them to the vet clinic to check that everyone is fit and healthy. Who knew poo could be so pretty?!

DISGUSTING MYSTERIES OF THE ANIMAL WORLD #523 During hibernation, bears don’t poo. They convert all their waste into protein, and scientists still don’t understand how.

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WHAT POO IS THAT? This key may help you identify some of the mysterious poos you may find in the wild.

How bad does the poo smell?

BAAAAADD!!! Like, ‘I just threw up in my mouth a bit’ bad!

Gross! Sounds like your poo might belong to a CARNIVORE or OMNIVORE. Where did you find this poo?

In my cat’s litter box

Floating in the ocean

URGH! IT’S IN MY MOUTH!!!

It was on the footpath in town, but now, it’s stuck to the bottom of my shoe

In the bush

Is it sloppy and green?

Probably a polar bear poo!

Odds are, you’re the victim of a lazy DOG owner.

Does it look like dog poo?

YES

YES Seriously? I think you got this one.

YES

NO

NO Could be from a NATIVE HEN

Probably from a SEAL

Can you see bits of bone in it?

Is it bright red or orange?

Are you surrounded by black and white birds standing in snow?

Sounds like your mouth is full of PENGUIN poo!

NO

Did a baby bird do this to you??

NO YES

YES

YES

Some sort of WHALE did this

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Maybe from a TASMANIAN DEVIL or QUOLL

Congratulations! You’re covered in EURASIAN HOOPOE chick poo!

I’m gonna be sick!

Sorry, no idea. You should try keeping your mouth closed in future though.

Actually, it’s pretty nice.

Well, that’s weird. How does it smell?

Not too bad. Sort of grassy. Oddly like berry jam

Eucalyptus-fresh! Strangely peppery Sounds like you’ve got yourself a HERBIVORE poo! KOALA! Best smelling poo in the bush!

Is your poo a big splatty pat?

Likely SEBA’S SHORT-TAILED BAT poo. They love munching on pepper vine berries!

Oh no, that’s BLACK BEAR poo – RUN!!!

NO YES Lots of little roundish balls in a pile? Probably a cow. Or maybe an elephant with the runs.

YES

Gosh, that could be heaps of things. Sheep, deer, rabbit ...

NO

Lots of tiny little pellets randomly distributed?

NO

YES

Poos are little cubes, possibly prominently displayed on a log or rock?

Maybe a BROAD TOOTHED RAT

YES

WOMBAT!

NO

No idea. Sorry!

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CHAPTER 7:

GROSS STUFF MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND Some gross things are so powerful, they change the shape of the world itself. You’ve probably seen poo used as fertiliser by people trying to perk up their gardens. But you might be surprised by some of the other ways animal excrement helps to create the world we live in.

BEAUTIFUL, WHITE, SANDY BEACHES – RUINED FOREVER Picture this. You’re walking along a beautiful, white, sandy beach. The sun is warm, the water turquoise blue. You lay out your towel, sit down and bury your feet into the deliciously warm, silky, white fish poo. You heard right. That sand came out of a fish’s butt. Out of lots of fishes’ butts, actually. Parrotfish are brightly coloured reef fish that crunch coral all day long. In fact, they barely stop – they spend 90% of their day eating.

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Their mouth parts look a bit like a parrot’s beak, and give the fish its common name. But it’s their teeth that do all the grinding, and they have plenty of them – about a thousand, in about 15 rows that go all the way down their throats. Old teeth are constantly replaced by new ones, just like sharks’ teeth. Parrotfish teeth aren’t just numerous. Viewed under a microscope, they’re super sharp, with extremely thin, pointy crystals covering all surfaces of the tooth, a bit like chainmail. Combined with a bite strength that is among the strongest in the animal kingdom, their tough teeth help them crunch through rockhard coral. Parrotfish can apply a bite pressure of 82 000 kilograms per square centimetre – that’s roughly more than 300 times that of a saltwater crocodile, great white shark or jaguar. But why would a parrotfish want to eat rock-hard coral? They aren’t interested in the calcium carbonate that makes up the coral’s

skeleton – instead, they’re after the algae, bacteria and polyps (small animals) that live inside the coral. While parrotfish munch, they also provide a valuable service to the reef ecosystem – preventing the corals from becoming covered in algae. Of course, what goes in must come out. Once the coral has been ground up in their body, the parrotfish poop it back out onto the reef, making beautiful, white sand! Not all beach sand is created in this way – it can also be created by the erosion of rocks, or the build-up of seashells or tiny organisms. Some beaches in Bermuda are actually pink, thanks to piles of singlecelled, shelled critters called foraminifera (FOR-ahmin-IF-er-rah). Still, some of the world’s best beaches were made by parrotfish poo. The largest parrotfish can poop out up to five tonnes of sand a year – more than enough for you to spread your beach towel on!

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Scientist profile:

DR STEVE LINDFIELD, MARINE SCIENTIST HOW DO YOU STUDY PARROTFISH AND CORAL? There are two ways to study parrotfish. The most fun way is to go scuba diving on coral reefs, where we can watch them, count them and use stereo-video cameras to measure their size. They are fun fish to watch, as they swim around using their pectoral fins – where their arms would be, if they had any! The other way to study them is not as much fun. It requires cutting up the dead, smelly fish – and parrotfish guts do smell especially bad, as they are full of decaying bits of coral and seaweed. We can tell how old dead fish are from their ear bones, and from looking at their insides we can see if they are old enough to reproduce.

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HAS THE KNOWLEDGE ABOUT PARROTFISH POO RUINED BEACHES FOR YOU? No, since I know it has been cleaned by seawater before washing up on the beach! Not all beaches have parrotfish poo, only those on pretty tropical islands with bright white sand and palm trees. If you are lucky enough to visit these places, then you may well be stepping in some poo!

DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW YOU WANTED TO STUDY FISH, CORALS AND THE OCEAN? Yes. I grew up with a life that revolved around fish, as my dad is a commercial fisherman. I also spent much of my time looking in rock pools and snorkelling. In high school I became interested in science, and bringing fish and science together started my career of exploring the ocean and its inhabitants.

CAN YOU SHARE SOME MORE FUN PARROTFISH FACTS? The bumphead parrotfish is the largest species, and can live at least 30 years. It can grow up to 1.2 metres long (the height of a 7-year-old child), and weigh more than 35 kilograms (roughly the weight of a 10-year-old child)! Most species are much smaller and don’t live as long (normally fewer than 10 years). The most fun fact is that parrotfish can change sex from females to males as they get larger! Like many other animals, the male parrotfish are the pretty ones with the bright colours.

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POO GARDENS Beaches aren’t the only ecosystems shaped by poo – many forests and other ecosystems also rely on animal poop. Many plants grow from seeds. But if every seed sprouted and grew directly under its parent plants, things could get crowded pretty quickly. A lot of plants have solved this problem by having seeds that can fly away on the wind, wash away in water, or stick to the fur of passing animals. But some plants have partnered with animals in a very special way. Have you ever noticed how delicious, yummysmelling and brightly coloured some fruits are? This is not a coincidence. The plant attracts the animal’s attention by offering a beautiful gift of fruit. In return, the animals eat the fruit and spread the plant’s seeds wherever they poo. This plant–animal relationship is a kind of mutualism: a relationship that benefits both the plant and the animal. The kind of seeds that are designed to be eaten can pass through an animal’s stomach safely. In fact, some seeds can’t even germinate unless they’ve been eaten first!

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GROWING TROPICAL RAINFORESTS FROM POO The world’s scariest-looking bird also happens to be a keen rainforest conservationist. The giant Australian southern cassowary, Casuarius casuarius (kas-you-AR-ee-us kas-you-AR-ee-us), weighs in at almost 50 kilograms and stands almost 2 metres tall. More dinosaur than bird, this bulky beast has coarse, black feathers; red and blue skin on its head and neck; a casque, also called a helmet; and huge, powerful legs. Their toes are tipped with strong claws, capable of causing serious injuries to anyone that comes between them and their lunch – or in the worst case, their own young! Despite their fearsome reputation, cassowaries are having a hard time, being hit by cars and attacked by dogs or wild pigs. Sadly, their numbers are falling fast. This is bad news not only for the cassowaries, but also for the rainforests they live in. These giant birds are responsible for spreading the seeds of at least 238 species of rainforest trees. Seventy of these trees have seeds so large that only the cassowary is big enough to eat them! This means that wherever cassowaries disappear, those trees could become extinct. Even more reason to slow down for cassowaries, and allow them to continue their rainforest poo gardening in peace.

POO GARDENING – NOT JUST FOR VEGETARIANS Surprisingly, you don’t have to be a vegetarian to spread seeds in your poo. The carnivorous cougars of North America, Puma concolor, are also important seed dispersers. And it’s not because they eat plants, but because they eat the animals that have eaten plants. By consuming seeds in the stomach of their prey, just one cougar and its poo can plant up to 94 000 seeds a year. And it’s a great deal for the plants too. Their seeds actually travel further, because they’ve hitched a ride inside not one, but two animals. Since carnivores hunt across large areas, the seeds could end up many miles from where they were originally eaten.

UNDERWATER POO GARDENS Tambaquis (tam-BAH-kih), or Colossoma macropomum (ko-LOSS-ohmah mak-row-POH-mum), are a kind of giant piranha. However, they have what might be considered unusual tastes. Rather than feasting on the flesh of other animals, these 30-kilogram fish cruise the waters of Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, on the hunt for floating forest fruits. Every year, when the wetlands flood, tambaqui move inland. They scoff down bellyfuls of forest fruits, depositing their seed-filled poos as they go. The bigger the fish, the further they travel – and the further they spread seeds. Scientists have found that some plants, like the Amazon’s tucum palms, rely almost entirely on fish like the tambaqui to spread their seeds. This makes protecting these fish even more important – because if you protect the fish, you protect the forest, and everything and everyone that relies on it to survive. And as tropical forests help fight global warming, that’s pretty much everyone!

Cassowary poo contains large seeds that only this giant bird can eat, transport and help grow – which has earnt cassowaries the nickname of rainforest gardeners.

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Scientist profile:

BRUCE WEBBER, BOTANIST OR ACCORDING

TO HIS CHILDREN, A ‘BOTTOMIST’ IN THIS CHAPTER, WE’VE TALKED ABOUT HOW POO PLAYS AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN ECOSYSTEMS. HOW DID YOU COME TO THE REALISATION THAT POO IS NOT GROSS, BUT ACTUALLY QUITE PRECIOUS? As a botanist (plant scientist) and keen gardener, I’ve always known that certain poos are loved by plants. After all, many poos are just a perfect combination of food and water for a growing plant! If we can see poo for what it is – an important part of the natural cycles of our environment – then it’s far easier to see it as plants do, not as a stinky log, but rather as an energy-rich food treat!

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DID YOU ALWAYS EXPECT TO WORK WITH POO ONCE YOU’D GROWN UP? As a boy, I was usually rolling around in the dirt or splashing in puddles. I was probably always coming into contact with fish poo or insect poo, which, as we know, is entirely harmless. Come to think of it, my first science experiment as a 10-year-old at primary school was on poo, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I became a poo scientist! I looked at how some chemicals we use to treat worms in our farm animals can hurt the amazing dung beetles that help to break down animal poo in the paddock. It was many years later that I returned to poo work, but given how important it is to the natural world, we should all show a stronger interest in poo.

WHAT’S THE GROSSEST THING YOU’VE HAD TO DO WORKING WITH CASSOWARY POO? I once had to get some cassowaries at a zoo to help me study the eating and pooing of plant seeds. When the cassowaries had done their ‘work’ on the seeds, I collected all their poo and then watched the seeds grow. The people visiting the zoo at the time thought it was very funny. Here I was in the cassowary enclosure searching for poos, sniffing and photographing them, and then carefully collecting them in lunch boxes!

CAN WE TAKE POO SCIENCE SERIOUSLY? Absolutely! For many plants, a poo is the perfect place to start their life. It provides all the food and water that the seed needs to grow. In my research I’ve found that some seeds grow far better when they have been eaten and pooed out, compared with when they just fall off the tree. So poos, particularly cassowary poos, are really important for the health of our rainforests. Cassowaries are actually known as the ‘rainforest gardeners’ because of this.

ANY FUNNY POO FACTS FOR OUR READERS? One thing that fascinates me is that even though we like to think we are made of stardust, we are also all made of poo. Once upon a time, all the material that our bodies are made of was poo – perhaps even dinosaur poo! So poo really is an essential part of our world.

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FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE ONE POO AT A TIME Speaking of how poos can help the environment, scientists have been increasingly surprised at the importance of poo in keeping our planet cool in the face of global warming. Scientists studying large colonies of seabirds in the Arctic have found that the birds’ poo releases chemicals that act as the basis for cloud formation. The clouds in turn reflect sunlight, which helps to cool the atmosphere in the Arctic region. Whale poo is also important for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Many whales feed at the bottom of the ocean, but do their business at the surface. Their poos bring nutrients up to the surface waters, which are otherwise nutrient-poor. Scientists have called this action the ‘whale pump’. The whales’ poo fertilises tiny, floating plants called phytoplankton, which are the beginning of a food chain that goes on to feed larger animals like krill and fish. Operating in the opposite direction is the ‘biological pump’ – poo and dead animals falling down to the ocean floor. When the phytoplankton die and fall to the bottom, they take with them the carbon they have absorbed from the air. This removes the carbon from the atmosphere, sometimes for thousands of years – making the deep ocean a powerful ‘carbon sink’. So, just in doing what comes naturally, whales are helping cool the climate – another unexpected bonus from the magical world of poo!

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POO WITH BENEFITS Around the world, people have come up with many ingenious uses for the truly renewable resource we call poop! Cow pats, or ‘dung cakes’ as they are called in India, are used in fires for cooking or warmth. Elephant poo makes excellent paper. That’s because elephants only digest about 45 per cent of what they eat, which makes their poos very fibrous (stringy). Just one elephant can generate enough poo to make more than 100 pages a day!

Llama poo has special pollution-fighting powers. It helps clean the dirty water that comes from mines, diluting the acid and removing dissolved metals. This makes the water safe to go back into the natural environment. The llama poo technique was originally developed in the United Kingdom using cow and horse manure. Who knew something that seems as dirty as poo could actually make water clean?

Bat poo, also called guano, contains saltpetre, a key ingredient of gunpowder (and fireworks). It was used to make explosives up until World War I. So maybe don’t drop a match around a pooping bat!

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POO FORTUNES, MADE AND LOST The tiny Pacific island of Nauru was torn apart by poo. The island was covered by thousands of years’ worth of bird guano, which is extremely rich in phosphate, and can be used to make plant fertiliser. Due to the high quality of Nauru’s ancient poo, 80 per cent of the island’s surface was scraped clear to mine it for phosphate. This created an environmental catastrophe in the form of a moonscape, unfit for agriculture or even building on. Some poo is better left undisturbed.

Hey, no photos! A mountain treeshrew attempts to enjoy a private moment, and a snack, on its pitcher plant toilet.

PITCHER PLANTS – TOILETS OF THE FOREST Pitcher plants usually attract ants or other insects with their sweet nectar. The nectar lures the insects down a slippery slope into the bottom of the pitcher, where they are doomed to drown in a pool of digestive juices. However, in the tropical cloud forest on the island of Borneo, where a pitcher plant called Nepenthes lowii (neh-PEN-thees LOW-ee-eye) grows, ants are in short supply. So this plant has found another way to get its nutrition – in the form of delicious animal droppings. The mountain treeshrew, Tupaia montana (too-PAY-ah mon-TAN-ah), is a small, cute, tree-dwelling mammal. It survives by drinking nectar, and the pitcher plant is only too happy to provide large amounts of it. Unlike the ant-trapping pitchers, the sides of Nepenthes lowii are non-slip, so the treeshrew has a safe grip. The pitcher walls are also stronger than normal. Even though the shrews only weigh about 150 grams, they’re still way heavier than even the fattest ant. To get a meal, the treeshrew sits at the top of the pitcher and begins lapping away. If it has to go to the toilet, the pitcher is perfectly positioned to catch the shrew’s poop. In fact, shrew poo is pretty much all the pitcher plant eats – another beautiful example of mutualism made possible by poo!

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GROSS INDICATORS OF SICK ECOSYSTEMS Plastics seem to be everywhere sometimes, and worryingly, they are showing up more and more in the natural world. Marine biologists have found tiny microplastics in seal scats. This provides evidence that plastic in the environment is making its way into the food chain. If you spend time in the bush near your local rubbish dump, you might find bird pellets that look like balls of plastic thread. They look like this because they are! Ravens, gulls and other birds eat rubbish they find at the tip, and then spew out the indigestible plastics. Plastics in the natural world? That’s a whole new level of gross.

Hard to swallow – this plasticfilled bird pellet was found near an open rubbish dump.

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CHAPTER 8:

WORLD’S GROSSEST ANIMALS REVEALED If there was a Guinness Book of Records for poo, spew and other gross things (as there should be), here are some of the entries it might contain …

WORLD’S BIGGEST POO Which animal does the biggest poo? The biggest one, of course! Blue whales are the largest animal ever to have lived. They can produce up to 200 litres of poo in one go – about the same volume as your bath filled right to the top! Scientists say that blue whale poo smells a bit like dog poo. It comes out soft and spongy, like breadcrumbs, in chunks the size of ping-pong balls. Whale ecologists use boats to chase after blue whales, hoping to scoop up some of these massive stinky streaks to learn what the whales have been eating.

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WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS DEFECATION Sometimes, pooing can be a matter of life and death. Consider the sloth. Their low-energy diets mean that they don’t do anything in a hurry, and this includes their toileting. Roughly once a week, a sloth will make the slow, dangerous journey from its treetop home to the floor of the forest. There, it will start what sloth ecologists call the ‘poo dance’, swaying from side to side as it creates a small hole in the ground. The sloth will then make a large deposit of a poo – so big, that the animal can be up to a third lighter once it’s finished! (Yes, this means that if you were a sloth weighing 30 kilograms, then your weekly poo would weigh 10 kilograms.)

If pooing is so dangerous, why do sloths even bother to come down from the trees? Scientists aren’t sure why; monkeys or koalas, for example, are perfectly happy pooing from the tops of trees. Some researchers think this trip to the ground might benefit a moth species that lives in a mutualistic relationship with the sloth. The moths in turn help the algae grow in the sloth fur, and the algae provide sloths with extra nutrition (see Chapter 2). Other scientists think the poo trip might be a way to meet potential mates when it’s time to breed. Whatever the reason, one thing’s for sure – for sloths, getting their weekly toilet trip over and done with must be a huge relief!

People studying sloths say you can see its abdomen shrink after it’s pooed. After this, the poo dance continues, with the relieved sloth slowly jiggling some leaves over its poo pile before making its way back up to the safety of the forest canopy. But not all sloth toilet expeditions end so happily. Sloths generally avoid coming down to ground, because that’s where many of their predators live. Scientists think that up to half of all sloths die on the toilet – pounced upon with their pants down by jungle predators, such as jaguars.

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This unfortunate curly-tailed lizard was killed by constipation.

DEATH BY PIZZA POO You are what you eat. And sometimes, what you eat can kill you. In 2018, scientists found an unusually fat curly-tailed lizard that had made her home under a pizza shop in Florida. When they picked her up, she was so fat that they assumed she was full of eggs. But what looked like a promising lizard pregnancy was actually a huge faecal bolus, a.k.a. ball of poo. The bolus was blocking up her insides, making up almost 80 per cent of her bodyweight.

The chubby lizard had been so busy snacking on bugs and pizza-grease-covered sand that her stomach had swollen to a massive size, and her digestive system couldn’t deal with it. Unfortunately, by the time the scientists found her, it was too late to save her. Let this be a lesson to those of you trying to live on pizza and sand alone!

WORLD’S WEIRDEST WEE-ERS Chinese soft-shelled turtles are the only animal in the world known to wee out of their mouths! Rather than using the normal body parts, it sticks its head into a puddle and washes its mouth out. Finger-like growths in the turtle’s mouth increase the surface area, allowing them to breathe underwater. But they also allow the turtle to squeeze out urea (the salts found in urine) directly into the water, in a process called oral urination.

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Scientists think that the turtles have evolved this strange toilet habit to help them survive in brackish (slightly salty) water. To remove this much urea using their kidneys, the turtles would have to drink lots of water, which in their brackish habitat, would mean drinking lots of salt at the same time. But their clever adaptation means they can just rinse out their mouths to wash their waste away.

WORLD’S THICKEST WEE Desert-dwelling animals have to get all their water from their food, squeezing moisture out of leaves and seeds. However, this still doesn’t provide them with much water, so they can’t afford to waste it by weeing like crazy. To conserve water, many desert animals have adapted their wee-ing ways by taking as much moisture out of it as they can before they excrete it. The world champion of wee concentration is Australia’s spinifex hopping mouse, Notomys alexis (no-TOE-miss ah-LEK-sis). Its wee is so concentrated that it’s pretty much solid!

WORLD’S GROSSEST ANIMAL Hagfish may well be the most disgusting animals on Earth. They look like eels and have teeth, but no jaws or bones. Infamous for their revolting table manners (see Chapter 2), hagfish have an even more nauseating ability. When threatened, they ooze loads of slime out of their skin. Instead of grabbing a chunk of fish, the would-be predator gets a disgusting mouthful of goo. Just a teaspoon of hagfish slime can expand almost instantly on contact with water, to 10 000 times its initial volume – enough to fill a big bucket, and certainly a predator’s nose, with mucus. To stop themselves from suffocating in their own slime, hagfish will tie themselves in a knot to squeeze themselves free.

Hagfish and their alarming habits are celebrated on World Hagfish Day – the third Wednesday of October. Although they are deeply repulsive, it makes a nice change to give a not-so-pretty animal a day of celebration. They may not be as cute as a dolphin or as impressive as a tiger, but without the hagfish to eat them, there would be way more gross, rotting fish lying around the bottom of the sea. So, here’s to the hagfish – unsung, revolting heroes of the deep!

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WORST PERSONAL HYGIENE

MOST POWERFUL POO-ERS

Is the weather a bit hot for you? Are you feeling a little overheated? Well, have you considered pooing on yourself? For a lot of birds, this is a perfectly acceptable way to cool down in hot weather.

The Humboldt penguin, Spheniscus humboldti (sfen-ISS-kuss hum-BOLD-tee), can shoot its poo out like a rocket! The projectile poop can travel a distance of up to 1.34 metres, which is nearly twice their body length. That’s like an average human being able to poo up to 3 metres away. Not as impressive as the caterpillar from Chapter 5, but still, not bad.

Scientists call this practice urohidrosis (EURoh-hy-DROH-siss). Birds caught in the act of this particularly gross form of personal airconditioning include storks, condors, flamingos and some vultures. They can’t really be blamed, though. Unlike humans, birds have no sweat glands, and so can’t sweat to cool down. By letting their sloppy droppings run directly down their legs, they rely on evaporative cooling to help reduce their body temperature. Some storks rely on this method so much that they end up wearing what look like white ‘poo socks’ below the normally red skin on their upper legs. Classy!

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Shooting out its poo helps the penguin keep its nest site clean, and means it doesn’t have to leave its eggs or chicks exposed when nature calls. Scientists discovered that the poo bombs can be shot out of a penguin’s bum at up to eight kilometres per hour (as fast as the average dodgem car), and that this requires extremely high ‘rectal pressure’. These poopy discoveries netted the researchers an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003. The Ig Nobels are awarded to research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.

CRAPPIEST WAY TO DIE Some animals can voluntarily drop body parts to distract predators – like when a garden skink drops its tail to avoid a cat. Called autotomy (orTOT-oh-mee), this allows the rest of the animal to escape to survive another day. Scorpions can drop their stingers to escape attack. But this will eventually lead to an especially crappy end, because when they lose their stingers, they lose something else important too – their anus! And this means that they can never poo again. To make things a little easier on themselves, the injured scorpion will switch to eating smaller prey (less food in = less poo out). But eventually, the poo

pressure will build up, sometimes causing further sections of the scorpion’s body to burst off. Eventually, their entire body cavity fills with waste. For these injured scorpions, constipation can kill! You might think that there’s no point in living if you spend the rest of your life literally bursting to go to the toilet. Why not just let the predator eat you, and die with your bum and dignity intact? Well, scientists have noticed that it’s mostly adult male scorpions that will sacrifice their tails to predators to avoid being eaten. Even without a tail – or an anus – they can still go on to mate successfully, so perhaps it’s worth the pain!

A sting in the tail? Scorpions that lose their stingers will eventually die from explosive constipation.

WORLD’S CRAPPIEST DRINK Would you boil up and drink something that had come out of your cat’s butt? Hopefully not. But that’s pretty much what kopi luwak is. A traditional drink of Indonesia, kopi luwak is made from coffee beans that have first passed through the digestive system of the Asian palm civet cat. This small animal looks a bit like a cross between a cat and a racoon, but with the long tail of a monkey. Known as luwak in Indonesian, the palm civets are said to munch on only the most perfectly ripe of coffee cherries, which are the fruit that surrounds the coffee bean. The luwak poos out the remaining pips in clumps that were traditionally collected by coffee producers to make a very rare type of coffee.

Coffee snobs claim kopi luwak to be the finest of all coffees, as the enzymes in the luwak’s stomach remove some of the acidity in the beans. Wild kopi luwak beans can sell for up to $1800 per kilogram. That’s a lot of money for a drink brewed from fancy poo! Sadly, as the drink has become more fashionable, people have started capturing the civet cats. They are often kept in uncomfortable wire cages to be viewed by tourists, and fed only coffee beans, when normally they’d eat a range of insects, lizards and forest plants. This is very stressful for these normally shy, nocturnal animals. Some people are happy to spend heaps of money so they can boast they’ve drunk this very odd and expensive drink. But looking at how most of it is made, we think that’s pretty crappy.

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FLIES – EVEN MORE DISGUSTING THAN YOU THOUGHT! No-one ever invites flies to their parties. Their table manners are the absolute worst. For starters, they never wash their hands – well, feet – before eating. In fact, they use their feet to ‘taste’ the things they land on, to work out if they’re worth eating or not. And what a fly considers worth eating often isn’t very nice – think rotting plants, dead animals, and of course, delicious piles of animal poo! As a result of their unclean habits, flies are notorious for spreading all sorts of bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms and other nasties that can make you really sick. They are also linked to the spread of deadly diseases like cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery (take a look back at Chapter 2).

Flies make terrible party guests. Not only are their table manners deeply disturbing, they also never offer to do the washing up.

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So, after dining on some dog poo, a fly might then flit to the cupcake you’re about to eat, stomping its pooey little feet all over the icing to get a taste. Flies tend to defecate before eating, so now your cupcake has fly poo as well as dog poo on it. Not content with smearing your food with excrement, flies take their grossness a step further. Unlike some other insects, flies have no teeth or jaws. They have to suck up their food as a liquid, using their spongy tongues to sop it up before sucking it down their long proboscis. If the food isn’t liquid already, the flies vomit up some of their stomach enzymes onto the food surface. This dissolves the food into a kind of spew milkshake, which they can then slurp up again. Mmm – delicious!

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JENNY SCOTT, SUB-ANTARCTIC FIELD ECOLOGIST Have you ever fallen into a really big, muddy puddle? Now imagine that puddle was full of poo, wee and rotting hairy skin. Welcome to the disgusting world of the elephant seal wallow!

Dr Jenny Scott is a sub-Antarctic field ecologist who’s been studying the plants and landscapes of Macquarie Island for more than 35 years. Like all expeditioners to Macca, as the island is known to its friends, Jenny’s had many close encounters of the elephant seal kind – some a little too close for comfort.

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Southern elephant seals, Mirounga leonina (mih-ROWN-gah LEE-oh-nee-nah), spend much of the year at sea. They come ashore to breed and moult during the summer months. Unlike humans, who lose hair and skin cells all the time, elephant seals do what’s called a catastrophic moult. They shed all of their old skin cells at once, and can’t go to sea while this is happening. Moulting makes the elephant seals all itchy and scratchy, and they rub themselves on whatever they can find.

Elephant seals are not small animals. A really big bull elephant can be up to 6 metres long and weigh as much as 4000 kilograms – that’s roughly the weight of two large cars! Imagine something the size of a medium truck, wrapped in blubber and rubbing up against you, and you’ll get some idea of the amount of damage even one elephant seal can do. And Macca is home to about 20 000 of them! All of this feverish rolling around creates massive muddy pits known as wallows. These are a known hazard for seasoned expeditioners, but often a trap for new visitors to the island.

‘They congregate in enormous piles and are very grumpy and irritable,’ says Jenny. ‘They live off their fat when they’re moulting, and will make their way into the coastal tussock grasses and peat beds, rubbing themselves on the plants and destroying them in the process.’

‘You can be fighting your way through the big tussocks, and all of a sudden, an elephant seal head will pop up out of a wallow hidden among the grasses,’ says Jenny. ‘This can cause you to step back quite quickly, and potentially fall into another wallow yourself!’

Regular visitors to Macca sometimes prank the ‘newbies’ by spreading grass or a board across an area of wallow. This makes the ground look solid, luring new expeditioners to their muddy doom. Jenny easily recalls falling into an elephant seal wallow on her first trip to the island. ‘We all endured the essential, but once-only experience of stepping mistakenly into a deep elephant seal wallow disguised as a smooth, semivegetated muddy patch between tussocks. In common with all others who relate this experience, I have no memory of either touching the bottom, or of getting myself out of it. All of a sudden, I sank – and the next moment, I was out on the edge gasping, covered with unmentionable brown slush.’ Despite the awfulness of this experience, Jenny went on to study how plants recolonise (regrow in) old elephant seal wallows. She and her team have photographed some of these sites for more than 30 years. The photos allow them to see how the landscape changes over time.

After such a stinker of an experience, you’d think the new expeditioners would be keen to avoid going anywhere near the wallows whenever possible. However, during the depths of a dark winter expedition, someone had the bright idea of holding a tug-o-war over one of the larger wallows near the station. ‘It was tradies versus everyone else,’ says Jenny. ‘I think you can probably guess who won.’ After being hauled through the unspeakable muck by the station’s carpenters and mechanics, Jenny and the other scientists and crew raced down to the shore. They threw themselves into the freezing waters to be tumbled clean of the stinking filth among the swirling kelp and the occasional curious elephant seal. Surprisingly, elephant seal wallows aren’t the most disgusting smelling thing on the island. ‘Rotting kelp is actually much worse,’ says Jenny, with a shudder. ‘It’s absolutely vile!’

Elephant seals like to be in constant contact with other objects, including one another. Animals that do this are called thigmotactic (thig-moh-TAK-tik). They have absolutely no concept of personal space! When assembled in large groups, elephant seals can look like a huge pile of muddy sausages.

Hi there! Bull elephant seals can be identified by their massive noses.

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GROSSARY This glossary of grossness defines words you might not have known before reading this book. It can also be used as an excellent resource for making up new insults. For example ...

‘You autocoprophragous alga!’ ‘You pap-breathed cloaca!’ ‘You frass-faced coprophage!’ ‘You feeble-minded caecum!’ ... and so on, and so forth. Happy grossary reading!

Adaptation: A characteristic of an animal that gives it an advantage. Adaptations have evolved through natural selection of generations after generations of a species. Natural selection means that some animals (and plants) of a species die, while others survive and breed. These animals pass on their genes (see Genetics) to the next generation, who grow up to look similar to their parents. If these animals have the same characteristics that make them more successful – like running faster or being better camouflaged – then their genes get passed on yet again. Over many generations, these genes are ‘selected’, spread through the population, and make the species as a whole better adapted to their environment. Adaptations can be physical (how they look), physiological (how their bodies function), or behavioural (how they act).

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Algae: Neither plant, animal nor fungi, algae are a group of organisms (living things) that, like plants, can create their own food using energy from the sun, in the process of photosynthesis (FOH-toe-SINtheh-siss). Algae are very diverse, ranging from microscopic single-celled organisms to the 60-metretall seaweed called kelp. They are often classified in three broad groups based on their colour – red, brown or green. The colour comes from a chemical known as a pigment, which is used in photosynthesis: for example, green algae have a green pigment called chlorophyll. We still have a lot to learn about algae, so if you’d want a career as a phycologist, who is a scientist that studies algae, you would be very welcome! Algae are becoming a very important resource: they can produce food and biofuel, and even potentially replace plastic.

Bacteria: A tiny form of life, bacteria are singlecelled organisms that are found everywhere on the planet in enormous numbers. A gram of human poo contains about 100 billion bacteria, while a gram of soil might hold about 40 million, and a litre of seawater has about a billion. Some bacteria make you sick, and others make you healthy. A lot of these happily live in your gut: see Microbiota.

Caecum: A pouch located between the small

Crop (in birds): A muscular part of the

and large intestines in the gut of some animals. As the caecum is important for the digestion of plant materials, herbivores have a large caecum, but it is almost non-existent in carnivores. In an adult human, the caecum is about six centimetres long, compared with two metres for an adult koala!

oesophagus (the very start of the digestive system) that can store food. A crop allows birds to eat a lot of food and keep some for later. Some birds also store food in the crop during flights back to the nest and then feed their chicks from it.

Camouflage: Similar to a disguise, camouflage

DNA: See Genetics.

is used to trick the eyes. Animals camouflage themselves by using material, colours or even behaviour to make themselves hard to see, or to mimic something else. For example, some moths have patterns resembling tree bark, while some butterflies have threatening ‘eyes’ on their wings to make predators think that they are a big scary animal. See also Mimicry.

Cloaca: Instead of having poo and wee coming straight out of different holes like humans do, many species have a chamber that the holes open into. This chamber is called the cloaca. It is actually quite popular: amphibians, reptiles, birds, some fish (such as sharks), monotremes (echidna and platypus) and more all have cloacas. Apart from excreting waste products, these animals also lay their eggs and can even mate through the cloaca. This is called cloacal copulation, a.k.a. a cloacal kiss!

Dominant: In a group of animals with a dominant and submissive structure, such as wolves or chickens, the dominant animals are in charge. They control access to resources, whether that is food or mates. The submissive animals have less freedom of action, and basically do what they are told.

Ecologists:

People with the best job in the world! Well, Nic and Rom think so anyway. Ecologists are scientists who study ecology – that is, trying to understand nature by studying how plants and animals interact with each other and their environment. Ecologists tend to enjoy spending time outdoors, getting excited about little creatures nobody else ever seems to notice, and talk about poo a lot. Some of them even write books about poo. Nerds!

Coprophagy:

The more-common-than-you-think habit of poo eating. Possibly even more disgusting is autocoprophagy, or the eating of one’s own poo.

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Ecosystem: A group of living things, their

Fungi (singular, fungus): Living organisms

environment and their relationships. An ecosystem can be described as a bubble of life – it can be as big as a forest or as small as a drop of pondwater. Even your stomach contains an ecosystem – see Microbiota.

that have their own kingdom – just like animals, plants and bacteria. Famous fungi are mushrooms, mould and yeast – the stuff that makes bread and pizza dough rise. Fungi can be very small (formed by just one cell, like yeast) or extremely large. The largest living thing in the world is a honey mushroom, Armillaria ostoyae (ar-mill-AR-ee-ah oss-TOYay). It lives in the United States and covers about 965 hectares – the equivalent of 1350 soccer fields.

Entomologist: A scientist who studies insects. Faecal:

Consisting of, contained in, or relating to poo. So, of great interest to us!

Fermentation: A chemical change in animal and vegetable matter brought about by microscopic yeasts, bacteria, and moulds. For instance, when making bread with yeast, the yeast ferments the sugar in the dough, creating bubbles of carbon dioxide gas, which make the bread rise. Yoghurt and sauerkraut are other examples of fermented foods.

Frass: Caterpillar poo! (Or from other insect larvae, too.)

Genetics:

The study of genes. Genes are like paragraphs in a long list of instructions that tell the cells of living things how to make themselves. The molecule that forms the ‘letters’ of the gene ‘paragraphs’ is called DNA, which is the abbreviation of deoxyribonucleic acid. You inherit your genes from your parents. Genes govern the way you look, such as your hair colour, eye colour and height. They also determine any hereditary diseases, such as Huntington’s disease and cystic fibrosis.

Gland:

An organ that produces substances such as hormones, oils or watery fluids and releases them into or out of the body.

Habitat: Where an animal lives and can find everything it needs to survive. As a human, your habitat is your home, but it’s also more than that. It’s the shops where you can find food, and the skate park or swimming pool where you can meet your friends. Because different species have different needs, they have different habitats. Beaches, forests, swamps and mangroves are all types of habitats where different animals and plants can be found.

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Mammals:

Mammals are a group of animals that are defined by a common set of features. These include hair, instead of feathers or scales; mammary glands, from which females produce milk for their young; and bizarrely, three middle-ear bones. But just look for hair and mammary glands – that’s easier.

temminckii (MAK-row-KEEL-iss tem-MINK-eeeye), wriggles its tongue to mimic a worm, which attracts fish straight into its mouth. Many orchid flowers resemble female insects to fool unsuspecting male insects, who visit the orchid looking for love but only collect pollen. Then the male gets fooled again (silly!) into visiting yet another orchid, pollinating that flower.

Microbes: Also referred to as microorganisms,

Mimicry is not just about looks – certain organisms mimic chemical signals like pheromones or the smells of food. For example, in this book you met the bird-dropping spider, which produces a substance that smells like the pheromones of a female moth. This attracts male moths, which promptly get eaten by the cunning spider.

microbes are very small living things (or nonliving, see Viruses) that can only be seen through a microscope. Includes groups like bacteria, fungi and viruses.

Microbiota: A group of microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi or viruses, that live somewhere on or inside a plant or animal. For example, they might live in an animal’s gut, or on its skin. The most studied group of all is the human gut microbiota. It’s important for digestion and the immune system, affects diseases such as diabetes and cancer, and even influences your mood!

Mimicry:

The way an animal or plant disguises itself by looking (or smelling) very similar to something else. The reasons for this are usually to escape a predator, catch prey or fool a pollinator. Some animals, such as butterflies and snakes, can mimic venomous or poisonous animals that are a danger to their predator. Others, like stick insects, spiders and caterpillars, can blend into the surroundings by mimicking bird poo, twigs, bark or leaves. The alligator snapping turtle, Macrochelys

Molecules: Tiny chemical ‘bricks’ used to build living and non-living things. Molecules are made of two or more atoms. Famous molecules include H O, the molecule that makes water, ² and DNA, the molecule that contains the instructions to make living things (see Genetics).

Oesophagus: The part of the digestive system between the mouth and the stomach. It’s usually long and thin like a pipe.

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Pheromone: A chemical substance released by

Species: A group of animals, plants or other

animals into the environment to communicate with other creatures, or to affect their behaviour. We don’t know whether humans still have the ability to use pheromones – more research is needed!

living things that share common characteristics and can breed to produce fertile offspring. For example, a horse and a donkey are different species, even though they look similar. When a horse mates with a donkey, the result is called a mule (if the horse was the mum) and a hinny (if the horse was the dad). Neither of these animals can breed further – they are infertile.

Predator:

An animal that survives by killing and eating other animals (see Prey). Predators differ from scavengers, which are animals that eat dead animals, although the line is often blurry between groups. Also, an animal can be a predator of something smaller, but a prey for something bigger. Think of a spider eating a fly, and then the spider being eaten by a lizard. A predator at the top of the food chain, such as a wedge-tailed eagle or a lion, is called an apex predator.

Prey: An animal hunted by a predator for food. Proboscis: In insects, a long tubular part of the mouth used for sucking. It’s basically the equivalent of having a long, flexible straw as part of your lip. Useful!

Regurgitate: The controlled return of undigested food up the oesophagus to the mouth. It’s different to vomiting, which is uncontrolled, and usually involves intense, painful contractions of the stomach, followed by forceful expulsion of the stomach’s contents through the mouth … and sometimes the nose as well. OK, moving on!

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Spp: A short way of saying species. It is often used when people are talking about several species within the same group.

Viruses: Viruses are just plain weird. They’re not considered to be alive, even though they can reproduce, as long as they can find a living animal or plant to use as a host. They are microscopic parasites that can often make their hosts very sick and even kill them. When we wrote this book, the infamous virus COVID-19 was circulating the world, using humans as its host.

POOS OF THE WORLD Do you know how to say ‘poo’ in another language? Here are a few examples, but there are lots more!

Afrikaans: poep Cebuano: tae Chinese: 便便 Croatian: kaka Dutch: poep French: caca German: kacke Greek: kακάκια Hungarian: kaki Irish: cac Italian: popò Japanese: うんこ te reo Māori: hamuti Polish: kupa Portuguese: cocô Spanish: caca Turkish: kaka Torres Strait Language – Kala Lagaw Ya: kuma Aboriginal Language – Kuku Yalanji: jaja

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The idea for this book was sparked by a conversation between Nic and the fabulous Melinda Chandler at the 2019 Ecological Society of Australia Conference in Launceston, Tasmania. Nic had been to far too many consecutive conference presentations, and her brain was full. When she had the opportunity to meet the lovely Melinda in the actual flesh at the CSIRO Publishing stall, she was only too pleased to plonk herself down behind the books and chat excitedly with Melinda and publisher par excellence Briana Melideo about potential book ideas. The best of these ideas involved taking all of the ridiculous, revolting science they all found fascinating, and turning it into a book. During the lunch break, Nic called Rom and asked her if she wanted to write a book about poo, spew, and other gross things animals do. As a poo evangelist herself, and having already given many talks and interviews about the exciting properties of koala poo, Rom really couldn’t say no. And so, this revolting book was born. Thanks to the CSIRO team for believing in our stomach-turning vision! We would like to recognise the contributions of all the scientists and photographers who let us interview them, use their photos, or provided the research we used to create this book. Thank you all for your generosity, and for allowing us to share the slightly disgusting fruits of your brilliant minds with the world.

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NIC’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wrote my parts of this book while working on my Masters degree with the Australian National University’s Difficult Birds Research Group. I’m grateful to the other Difficult Birds who listened with apparent enthusiasm to my descriptions of the exciting, revolting things I’d recently discovered – biologists are gross too, but in the best possible way. Extra thanks go to my super-friend Dejan ‘D’ Stojanovic, who more or less good-humouredly allowed me to bat away questions regarding progress on my Masters degree with excuses like ‘Sorry, I can’t talk to you about my thesis right now – I’m super-busy researching otter anal jelly!’ or ‘Look, you know I’d love to write up my field trial results, but DID YOU KNOW THAT LOBSTERS WEE OUT OF THEIR FACES?!’ Thanks also to Adam Cisterne, my owl-spew hunting buddy, who was always ready to take a break to examine weird-looking poos and spews we found in the field, and to pontificate as to their origins. He also stepped in to take my owl-spew detection dog, Zorro, out for adventures when I was busy working on this book. I’d like to say my conservationdetection dogs, Zorro and Gromit, were helpful in the creation of this book, but their main contribution was to drag me away

from my desk to see what they were barking at (spoiler: it was usually one another). To be fair, Zorro also found some gross things for me to take photos of for the book, so thanks for that too, I guess. Nimbus the cat showed her support by snoring loudly under the bed in the next room – sometimes with cats, you’ve gotta take whatever you can get. My partner, James Da Costa, was significantly more helpful than my other housemates. Not only did he bring me tea in bed on a regular basis, he was also very helpful in art directing the poo photo shoot that produced many of the images used in this book. He also didn’t snore anywhere near as much as the cat, and unlike the dogs, I have not once caught him eating out of the cat’s litter tray. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge my nieces, Orla and Saoirse – thanks for being my adventure buddies, always keen to pick up an exciting bird pellet or to examine a pile of bones for clues. This book is for you, and for all the kids out there who aren’t afraid to get a bit grubby in their search for exciting animal adventures.

ROM’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my niece Manon and nephews Ulysse, Démian, Aodrenn and Léandre, and my godson Maxwell. They inspired me to share poo excitement with children, instead of limiting myself to my continuous, annoying – I mean, entertaining – conversations about poo with adults.

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INDEX algae 23, 61, 73 ambergris 40 animal toilets 31, 33, 35, 51, 70, 73 Anthropocene 52 anus 11, 12, 77 autocoprophagy 19, 25, 35

digestion 9, 12–17, 19, 24–25, 64, 67 dinosaurs 56 diseases associated with poo 21, 78 DNA 24 dogs 6, 7, 22, 30, 55 dugongs 29

bacteria 9, 23, 25, 27, 47, 48, 54, 61, 78 bats 33, 58–9, 69 beach 60–62 bears 58, 59 bees 16–17, 27 beetles 19–21, 38 birds 11, 13, 16, 38–39, 45, 47, 48, 64–65, 67, 76 blood 43, 46 bolus 74 botanist 66–67 brainwashing with poo 35 building with poo 26–27, 39 buttholes 11, 18–19, 32, 43, 76

echidnas 54 ecologist 14, 24–25, 28–29, 52–55, 80–81 ecosystem 9, 20, 23, 26, 57, 61, 64–65 elephants 26, 68 excretion 12 extinction 64

caecotropes 19 camouflage 23, 38, 42–43 carnivores 12, 54, 58–59, 65 cassowaries 64–65, 67 catching food with poo 19 caterpillars 43 cats 31–32 civet cats 77 climate change 65, 68 cloaca 10 coffee 77 coprolites 56 coprophagy 18–22, 36 coral 29, 60–62 corpse flower 41 cougars 65 cows 12, 17, 21, 23, 47, 68

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farts 17, 47 fermentation 47 ferrets 12 fish 23, 28–29, 60–63, 65, 75 flies 21, 40, 78 folivores 53–54 foxes 46, 54 frass 38, 43 frogs 26 fungi 9, 23 geckos 11, 46 glands 29, 34, 36, 48 guano 69, 70 habitat 26, 52, 55 herbivores 12, 53–54 hippopotamus 37 hoatzin 47 hornbills 39 identifying animals from poo 52–57 insects 16–17, 20–21, 23, 26–27, 34, 38, 40, 42–43, 50–51, 54, 70, 74, 78–79

koalas 24–25, 53, 55, 58–59 lemurs 45 lions 57 llamas 68 lobsters 37, 44 mammals 12, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 31–32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 44, 45, 47, 53–54, 55, 57, 58–59, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 77, 80–81 manatees 17 marine scientists 28–29, 62–63, 71 mice 75 microbes 9 microplastics 71 millipedes 47 mimicry 38, 42–43 mites 11 monkeys 36, 73 moth 23, 42, 73 moulting 39, 81 mucus 12, 28–29, 39, 51, 75 mutualism 64–65, 70 naked mole rats 35 omnivore 54 otters 36 owls 13–16, 19, 57 parasites 28, 48, 51, 54 parrotfish 28–29, 60–63 pee 10, 30, 32, 34, 36–37, 38, 45, 74–75 pellets, bird 13–16, 57, 71 penguins 76 pitcher plant 33, 70 plants 33, 40, 66–67, 70 plastics 71 predators 18, 23, 27–28, 30, 32, 35, 38–39, 42–46, 48, 51, 52, 73 projectile poo 37, 43, 51, 76

rabbits 19 reptiles 11, 46, 48, 74 rhinoceros 31 rodents 54, 64–65, 70, 75 scent marking 30–31, 34, 36, 53 scorpions 77 sea cucumbers 18 seals 71, 80–81 seeds 64–67 self defence 18, 42–49 shrews 70 skunks 47 slime 14, 75 sloths 17, 23, 73 snot 28–29 sparkly poo 54, 57 spew 16, 22, 34, 40, 45, 57, 71, 78 spiders 42, 50–51 stinkbirds 47 storks 76 sugar gliders 34 swifts 39 termites 27, 50 threatened species 26, 64 tigers 31 turtles 74 virus 9, 78 vomit 13, 16–17, 22, 34, 40, 45, 51, 78 vultures 45, 76 wallow 80–81 whales 40, 44, 55, 68, 72 wombats 53–54 zone of repugnance 23 zooplankton 29

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PICTURE CREDITS Thank you to the following people for permission to use the photographs on the pages listed below. All other photographs were supplied by the authors.

Page 6: James Da Costa

Page 67: Edward Tsen

Page 7: Marie Colibri

Page 70: Chien C Lee

Page 12: James Da Costa

Page 74: Edward L. Stanley, Florida Museum of Natural History

Page 19: Julie Dewilde Page 24: Ben Moore (scientist photo) Page 28: Scott Ling Page 33: Merlintuttle.org/Science Photo Library Page 34: Giselle Owens Page 35: Eric Isselee Page 36: Ondrej Prosicky Page 38: Hickson Fergusson Page 42: Greg Anderson (top), Robert Whyte (bottom) Page 49: Piotr Krzeslak Page 50: Alan Henderson Page 55: Marie Colibri Page 56: © George Frandsen/Poozeum Page 62: Niall McCarty Page 64: Bruce Webber, Webber Photography (www.webberphotography.net) Page 65: Helen Penrose Page 66: Edward Tsen

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Page 77: Pisut chounyoo Page 78: John Manger, CSIRO Scienceimage Page 80: Photograph courtesy of Dr Jenny Scott Page 81: buteo

This book stinks … we think you’ll love it! Poo, Spew and Other Gross Things Animals Do! will show you how being gross isn’t just hilarious - it can be an important survival strategy for animals all over the world. Take a deep breath and step into the world of not just poo, but also spew, snot and all the other gross things animals do to survive and thrive. From using poo to build a nest, leaving stinky secretions to find a mate, or oozing slime to deter a predator, the animals in this book are amazing … and revolting. Discover a whole world of poo, learn how to be a poo detective, and meet some of the great scientists doing gross and yucky work! You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You might even throw up!

About the authors Nic Gill is a Tasmanian author, environmental writer and conservation dog handler. Her dog, Zorro, is a Tasmanian masked owl vomit detection dog, and is also an avid consumer of books, albeit in a more literal sense than Nic would like. Dr Romane Cristescu trained and worked as a vet in France before relocating to Australia to study koalas. She is also a poo science evangelist, who likes nothing more than discussing the illuminating qualities of animal excrement at otherwise polite parties.

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