Hello.
My story about poop is an embarrassing one, and one I am comfortable to share, but one that is embarrassing, and like a lot of embarrassing stories, it happened when I was much younger. I was in fifth grade at my first experience of staying away from my parents with my school class. It was at an outdoor ed adventure in the woods where you do ropes, courses and team building exercises and you stay in a cabin. I remember
being excited for it. I remember having good friends in elementary school, and I remember the first day going rather well, where we were in the woods, playing outside. The first night was a large like sort of cafeteria style lunch where we had I don't remember what the food was, but I sat with my friends. Everything was rather normal, and then we took a long walk to there was a planetarium attached to this outdoor ed facility, and we were going to see a late night probably like eight
or nine o'clockanitarium show. And I remember walking with my friends talking, and my memory is a little fuzzy at this point, possibly for reasons to protect myself, but at a certain point during this walk, I think I attempted to fart and poop came out, and then poop continued to come out, and at a certain point, I don't know what happened in my brain, but I was okay with continuing to let poop come out because there was really nothing I could do. I was committed to going
to the planetarium. I was committed to seeing this through, and I truly didn't know.
What else to do.
And I'd already done the poop and I thought it was done. So every time a new wave of having to go to the bathroom came to me, I let it happen. And I remember walking with a lot of poop in my pants. My pa were jeans, they were like tough denim jeans, and the poop was like I would describe it as like toothpasting down my leg. It was really horrible, but again I wasn't like super disturbed by it. In the moment we went to the planetarium, I sat next to my friends. I promise I think
I continued pooping. I remember people smelling it. I remember successfully just saying it wasn't me and saying that I smelled it too, And then I remember walking back to our cabin immediately going to the shower, taking off my pants in the shower, attempting to clean my pants so that I could put them in a bag that I could take home with myself. I remember that shower being possibly, at least up until that point, the greatest shower of my entire life. And that is the end of the story.
I did put myself again the next day. It wasn't as obscene or abundant, but it happened again. And I don't know if it was nerves, if it was something about the diet. But that is my poop story and I am not proud of it. I think my life would be very different had my friends found out, and most of them still don't know. But anyway, that's my story.
Thank you so much for brilliant willing to share that.
Hi.
I'm Erin Welsh and I'm Erin on an update and this is this podcast will kill you.
Welcome to Poop Poop, Poop, Poop Yeah, Part one.
I think we decided to do an episode or two episodes about poop without really knowing what they were going to be about, and we're just like poop that sounds like something we would talk about, like it is.
On on on end, just like continue to talk.
About yeah, yeah, but we are going to We eventually were like, Okay, I guess we'll have to come up with topics specific to poop. What do people want to know about poop? And yeah, and so here we are. Now here we are. So this episode we're going to be talking about what is in poop, how we make poop, and I'm going to go in to a little bit of like poop in the Animal Kingdom.
I am so excited and not just like how animals poop, but like all of the ways in which we can use poop. Yes, exciting.
Poop is a resource. Is how I had originally titled this. The second episode was just like poop is gross, poop is gross. Yeah, So and next week we're going to go into yeah, more of poop is gross? And then what happens when you can't poop the way that you should poop? Talk about it, and I'll talk about like toilets, the history of sanitation, just how disgusting ancient Rome really was.
I cannot tell you how excited I am to hear about how disgusting ancient Rome was.
Well, I want to hear more about fiber and I'll.
Tell you about it. I'm not going to tell you that much about parastels.
I just like the word, just wanted to be able to say.
We'll say it multiple times.
Oh, poop quarantine any time we have that, Actually have that completely forgot a while since we've like recorded recorded, What are we drinking this week?
We're drinking drink number.
Two, drink number two.
Of all the ways that you can say poop, we found that one to be the most charming.
I really do, I really do like it. It's good, it's a good one.
It's also a delicious drink.
It is what is in poop? Or sorry, what is in drink number two? Not poop number two?
I'll tell you that later. But what's in drink number two is basically like a mint chocolate martini situation. So there's vodka, there's cremded cacao or something similar to that chocolate liqueur Bevermitch knops. You can tell I don't make the drinks.
Some chocolate syrup. You know, it's gonna be all right done. We'll post that on social media at least at least possibly website if we can get on that.
Honestly, it's been a struggle.
You know, it's fine.
You just have to follow us on socials, Yes, please do, and then you'll see it there.
And also on YouTube on YouTube because we're here in the exactly right studio we are. It's really fun to be here again. And if you would like to experience some of that joy with us, please go to YouTube dot com the exactly right media channel and you'll find.
Us and we're there. This whole season has been on YouTube.
It has been so it's been quite with some occasional really fun videos and pictures.
We have a couple for you today. We do all right with some props, with some props also business last piece we swear. We're also a website. We do have a website.
Yeah, it's true.
This podcast with kill you dot com. We have a lot of things there. You can find all of the sources from this episode and all of our episodes. You can find links to our bookshop dot org, affiliate account, our good Reads list, and merch merch merch. You can also find transcripts, YEP and bloodmobile. Who does all of our music ye first hand account, first hand account form, contact us form. There's a lot there.
There's lots. Okay, are we finally ready for number two?
I think so Aaronka, Okay, we'll take a break and get started.
Poop.
Sorry, every time I say the word poop it makes me laughs. I know. Poop is the non digestible parts of our food, mixed up with a bunch of digestive juices, mucus, left off cells from our gi tract, and of course tons of bacteria, both living and dead.
What do you mean by tons?
Oh, I'll tell you. Okay, just do you wait? So I thought that for the start of this episode and this series, really where we're going to be talking so much about poop, it feels important and also fun for me to go through the process of digestion and learn how we make a poop together, How we make a poop together, Learn together how we make a poop?
Okay, okay, I prefer that.
Yes, Miss Frizzle did this on a lovely journey through Arthur's digestive tract.
I still remember this same.
So we're basically going to take Miss Frizzle's journey through our own digestive tract. Along this journey, we might mention a lot of places where things could go wrong. I'm not going to get stuper into detail on the things that could go wrong right now. But if you have questions, I know you'll ask them. You know, I know qualms about that, no, But mostly I'm going to be talking about like the process of digestion, how we make a poop so that we know really what is in our poop.
And the next week is when we'll talk more about how things can go wrong with a digestion and poop poop manufacturing, Yeah, manufacturing Ltd. So digestion and starts in our mouth as soon as we put a bite of food into our mouth. We've got amylases and other enzymes in our saliva that start the process of breaking down the complex starches that's in our food, and of course our teeth are grinding and breaking things down into teeny
tiny pieces. As we swallow that food, matter will pass through our esophagus aided by these muscular contractions that you love so much that we call peristalsissus, as well as aided by all of that saliva that we mixed our food up with, and then our esophagus has to travel all the way like from our mouth basically down through a hole in our diaphragm, which is that muscle that separates our chest from our abdomen through a hole in that diaphragm, and then through a sphincter called the lower
esophageal sphincter. Sphincters are a recurring theme.
Oh yeah, they're attract They are essential.
Exactly, Yeah, very much so. And our food bowlless, which is what it's called at this point, will land with a splash I like to imagine in the digestive acids of our stomach.
Okay, so it's like a sea of acid.
A little see it's probably not realistically, but it's the
way I like to imagine it, okay, okay. And our stomach is up in the upper left hand side of our belly, got it, okay, And there in our stomach it will churn literally with muscular contractions and burn literally with hydrochloric acid, as well as other enzymes that our stomach makes, like pepsin and other things, to further break down our food and create this kind of like liquidy, mushy mass that's called chime cime chyme, and our stomach then lets that cime out a little bit at a
time through yet another sphincter called the pyloric sphincter.
How little at a time do you what do you mean?
It's a great question. So the amount of time, how little it kind of depends on what it is that you're eating. So liquids are gonna donut.
Like we just eight.
It usually takes half of our food will be emptied from our stomach in about an hour or so, wow, okay, and then the rest of it. It can really just depend on how much fat was in it, how well we chewed it, because bigger pieces that are larger than like two millimeters cannot pass through that sphincter, so they have to be broken down further before they can pass through. And all of that just happens in our in our stomach.
So it's doing all of that, but usually between two and four hours, your stomach is completely empty after a meal two.
And four hours. And fat, more fat means longer time digestive.
Exactly, yes, because it kind of sits on top because it floats, and so then it like whatever takes longer for it to kind of end up passing through that sphincter. And in that way, our stomach is a really important regulator of our digestion, right because it is slowly letting food or cime rather out of our stomach into our small intestine at a rate ideally that our small intestine
can actually handle it. If it just dumped all of the contents at once, that would be miserable and you would feel really sick from it because you're small intestine. And I feel like really doesn't get enough credit in RGI track.
It's so huge, it's huge. It's it's not aptly named. No, it is the long intestine.
It is the long intestine. It is small in diameter, and that's why it's called the small intestine. But yes, it is also the place where we are doing all almost of the absorption of our nutrients. Like you could take out someone's entire stomach, you could take out someone's entire colon. You really cannot take out their whole small intestine.
But you can take up like chunks of it.
Even taking out small trunks of it can have pretty significant effects and ends up with what we called short gut syndrome, which can have quite a lot of side effects. So anyways, I just really like small intestin doesn't get enough cred.
How long is the small intestine?
Great question? Anywhere from let me check my notes, because that's later three to five meters, which is like nine to sixteen plus feet.
I mean, it's just all coiled up in there.
Yeah. I want everyone to know that I tried really hard to make like a large diagram.
Did you make it to scale like you were going to have like nine It was like the size of my child. Okay, well your child's not nine feet.
No no, no, well neither are we.
But it was coiled yeah. Oh oh, I see.
I just meant yeah anyways, but I didn't, so I have no visuals right now except my hands. Okay, where are we, Aaron? We've gotten way off course.
We started giving credit to the small intestine.
So that's where all of our food that our stomach lets out makes it. And in addition to all of the absorption which is happening in our small intestine, our small intestine is also a place of continued digestion. So our gallbladder, which everyone is an expert on now because we did an episode on gall batter as well as our pancreas, are both secreting additional digestive enzymes into our
small intestine. They let them out in the first part of our small intestine, and that like finalizes the process of digestion essentially.
For the most part, so things are digested.
So things are all the way broken down because they have to be broken down all the way into like their singular components. Right. All of our starches and carbohydrates from things like bread have to be broken down into single sugars. Our proteins have to be broken down into single amino acids. Fats have to be broken down into fatty acids so that in our small intestine they can be absorbed through that intestinal wall and into our bloodstream so that we can actually use these things.
So it's like digestion, extraction, excretion, yeah, okay.
Yeah, except the colon does more than excretion and we'll get there just one second. So yeah, So that's our small intestine and what it's doing the whole way down. There's like three different parts that have different names, and each of them absorb different things. Don't ask me any specifics. Most all of everything is absorbed within the first two thirds are duodenum and ju juna, the first parts of our small intestine, and then the last part is called
the ilium. And there, even though most things have been absorbed by then a few things are very important to be absorbed only in that spot, like B twelve as well as our bio salts throwback to our salt better episode. Interesting why it's so specialized. Each part of our system has a purpose. And then at the end of this sixteen ish feet journey, there's yet another sphincter, the iliosecual valve.
Okay, I just have to say that all of my all of my favorite words apparently are digestive.
Yeah, sphincter, peristosis, du yeah.
Not sphincter. It was the ill sekul il, I mean sphincter. Fine, I love like spin. I would put it up there, but not like it's not it's nowhere near duodenum.
Okay, it's a good yeah, yeah, these are good words. So at this iliosecal valves is what separates the small intestine from our large intestine, which is also called our colon and our colon. It kind of is the star of the show when it comes to poop, because this is where this mushy mass of chime and digested food bits that are left over turns into poop. This happens in our colony. Our colon starts down in the right lower right quadrant of our abdomen. It snakes up that's
called our acending colon. Oh yes, towards our lever. It goes across the top of our belly, and then it travels down to our lower left quadrant, and then it does a s curve okay, like colon down and back to our rectum okay, and then it exits our anus.
Yet another sphincter, two sphincters exactly what.
Yes, The large intestine is called the large intestine because it's much wider than our small intestine, So it's like, yeah, it's like five to eight send me instead of two to four centimeters, but it's not nearly as long. It's like five feet ish one hundred and fifty centimeters or
so long a meter and a half. And the way that we go from this pure liquid cime that's rushing through the water side of our small intestine and into the formed tubes that we think of as turds is because our colon is absorbing all of the water that is left over. Right, our small intestine does a crap ton of water absorption as well, but our colon that is the primary function of it. It's reasorbing water and electrolytes, especially sodium, because the water follows the sodium, and that
is like its main job. It's absorbing like one to two liters of water per day. It also has a ton of musculature around it, and so it is doing peristalsis to really mix all of those contents to make sure that any other things that didn't get absorbed, things that need further breakdown by the microbes that live in our colon, which do a really important role in breaking down the last bits of things.
And I'm assuming that the our microbio our gut microbiome is very different from one start of the small intestine all the way to the end.
Absolutely, yes, every aspect of our gi tract has its own microflora. Love that, yes, but yeah that. And then at the end of that, at the very bottom of this gastro intestinal tract, the last pieces, the rectum and the anus, are really really important. Now, the anal canal, it's only a couple of inches long, super short, but it has in that two different sphincters. There's the internal
sphincter and the external sphincter. Now, the internal anal sphincter is not really under voluntary control, so that's automatically opening and closing. And it does this when your rectum starts to fill with poop. Listen, we're going there, We're there. It's we're deep in it. As your rectum starts to fill with poop, this causes your internal anal sphincter to relax, to let a little bit of the contents of that rectum into the anal canal. Okay, okay. Then there's sensors there.
There's like a system where it talks back to your brain through the sensory system in your anal canal that can tell is it a pooper? Is it a part?
But they can't. I mean, it can't always always account.
But you sometimes can. And so then you go and have control over that external anal sphincter so that if it senses poop and you're in a place where you can let it out, then you relax that external anal sphincter and letter poo. Or you sense that there's poop and you're like, I'm not there yet, and so you can clench that external anal sphincter, which everyone's probably doing right now as they listen, or you can sense that it's a fart and you're like, now's the time.
Now's the time.
Release okay, and hope you're right and hope that you're right about it. And that is how we make.
Poop amazing, isn't it.
I just really feel like that journey deserves credit.
So there's more parastals. The large intestine or the colon is the star when it comes to parastlsis.
Everything is parisalicing because you need it to be able for your food to even make it to your stomach to begin with, your stomach has a lot of musculature and it's also contracting, but your colon just has like a different setup of muscles where they have these like transverse muscles that run along the whole colon as well as around, so they just do a little different types of contraction to really form those turds.
I really want to ask questions about like what when does your stomach hurt? What is actually hurting? But I know that that's probably more next week and it's so variable.
But yes, we'll talk where about that next week when you have where does that happen? Oh? Do you mean bor barrigmy?
What there's a word for that? And get another really good world.
I know it's really good. Wow, bor Berrigmy is the tummy gurgs that you get? The gas bubbles?
Okay? Why does it have a name because it's so good? Where does that come from?
I have no clue.
Is it a person?
These are questions for you.
No, I know, I literally in that one of the episodes, I have a whole thing on etymology.
It might be is it this one?
I think it is this one? It is?
Yeah, Well I don't have answers for those questions, but I do want to talk a little bit more about the poop that that we have now formed. You asked at the beginning, like how long does it take for us to just empty that stomach? And so that's you know again anywhere from like one to four hours. But this whole process of forming a turd can take such a long time. It's anywhere from like twenty four to seventy two hours. We're talking like one to three days, or if.
It's gum, it's five years.
That was way too big of a laugh for that, Sorry, but I thought it was quite funny. Yeah no, uh yeah, but it's it's hugely variable, which I think is so fascinating because it's not just that it varies person to person, which it does, but it can also vary depending on what you're eating. So fiber, I was just about to say,
which we'll talk more about next week. Okay, fiber can significantly increase transit times, meaning that things move quicker through your colon and through your small intestine as well.
Okay, increase transit times as in like faster, faster moved through.
Yeah, yeah, less traffic Okay, okay, But anyway, the main timeframe is like between one to three days.
One to three days, And what about other things that change transit time.
Fiber is the biggest one that has been studied, but there's also like there's lots of medications that can slow down transit, big huge glp ones that everyone is on right now, the like ozembics of the world. That's like one of their main mechanisms is slowing down gastric emptying and so they slow your transit time. But lots of other medicines can too.
Yeah. Why do like opioids slow down transit time?
I think because of something about the receptors that they're working on, where there's also opioid receptors in your GI tract, but yeah, they can cause pretty substantial constipation. The SSRIs also can affect your gut motility in general, not necessarily slowing it down, but sometimes sometimes spinning it up, but just cause more worried me, just more movement there because of how much serotonin we have in our guts. So there's a lot of different medicines that can do that.
And there's also, in addition to a range in like how long it takes you to make your poop, which might affect how often you poop, there's also a huge range in consistency of poops. And for that we can talk about one of my favorite things in all of medicine to talk about, which is the Bristol stool scale or the Bristol formed stool scale. And I think we have an image of it, but you can google it if you're just listening. It's called the Bristol stool chart.
And this was invented in nineteen ninety, yeah.
Which feels like it should have been invented in much year ago, ten.
Right exactly, But it wasn't. It was within our lifetimes. Yeah, And they actually invented this or they came up with this really as a way to correlate stool transit time. So it was like the longer that your stool was taking to move through your guts, the harder your poops were going to be. So a type one stool are described as separate hard lumps like nuts. So like you're
popping out pellets, rabbit pellets. Oh, like these rabbit pellets rabbit pellet, which I have a shout out to the San Diego Natural History Museum for letting me borrow their poop there.
It's not real poop, just in case anyone is concerned that it's.
Really accurate fakeo. So yeah, like hard hard rabbit pellets is like a type one, and then a type seven is just like pure liquid poop, just completely watery, no pieces type of poop and deal poop is considered usually between three and four and sometimes the type five.
So sometimes is that just like depending on.
The person dependence really like what is normal for you might be different than what's normal for someone else.
That's interesting in and of itself.
I know, right.
Uh.
And also this is a slightly different scale for kiddos who are very prone to constipation, but their scale is a little bit different. Just to make it easier for kids because they have a harder time describing their poop.
Okay, yeah, why why do kids have Is it just they're not eating fiber.
I think it's more that they hold their poop, especially in toddlers, like they'll be like volitional stool holding, it's called, and so they basically are like either afraid to poop in the potty or it's like too big of a change for them, or they have one bad poop and now they're scared of it. There's like so many things.
That during the potty training.
But then once constant We'll talk more about this next week. But once constipation starts, it's really hard, like it's a it's a vicious cycle. Oh yeah, it's a heart it's a hard Okay, break, I want to ask questions I know next week, but that I mean, that's like how we make poop. These are the ways that our poop can look really varied. I don't know what other questions that you have about poop.
Fiber. Talk to me about fiber and yeah, no, excuse me.
What do you want to know? I'm gonna talk more next week about fiber. Okay, Okay, what fiber does on like a general level is it holds onto water.
It holds onto water.
So fiber are parts of plant material that we cannot break down ourselves. Some parts of fiber, our gut bacteria can break down, and they do so, and when they do then they usually produce gas. And so that's why sometimes fiber can make you real bloated and gassy because your gut bacteria are so thrilled about it. But other times they don't really break it down. And then all it is is this basically like large structure that holds
onto water. And so because your colon is mostly just absorbing water, the more fiber that you have, the less water that you're absorbing from that, so the softer your stool stays. It also provides this like bulking agent, which then your colon can peristals against and that is why it moves along as well too. Okay, so that's basically fiber.
I do have a question I was thinking, So, okay, so you talked about that the poop is our undigested or well okay, the.
Leftover fliptovers, Yeah, leftovers.
And then it's also bacteria and some of our own gut microbes. How much of it is gut microbes, what about our intestinal shedding? You know what? Tell me?
So glad you asked, that's the last thing I wanted to tell you, Like we work so well together. So because that gets into like, okay, I said that it's just the leftover parts, and now we know what our guts are doing the whole way down. But like, what really is our poop made out of? What is the a turd in the toilet? What is it really?
Well on the stool scale, on some stale.
Yeah, seventy five percent of our poop is just water, seventy five percent on average if we're talking like a Bristol three to five. Sure, Okay, the less the more constipated, the harder the stool, the less water it's going to have. But so seventy five percent or so of it is usually water and the remaining twenty five percent is like biomass. Up to fifty five percent of that biomass is bacteria. Wow, and up to fifty percent of that bacteria are still alive.
Of those bacteria, Sorry for my grammar. So we're talking like I also didn't even mention this, but like in your in your colon, especially because that's where we think about our gut microbiome the most because that's where we have the most abundant flora, even though we have microbes everywhere. Sure, we are talking hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of individual bacteria from hundreds, if not thousands of different species,
all of which are doing different things. They're serving different roles, including helping break down the final bits of food that weren't broken down by our digestive tract in our small intestine and our stomach, including making vitamin K and a number of B vitamins that are essential for us to then absorb in our colon, and playing a huge role in our immune system protecting us from infection with other bacteria,
and then also just like modulating our immune response. And the more that we learn about our gut microbiome, the more of a role that we know that it has in like our total body health. So when we're pooping out, like half of the actual mass of our poop is just bacteria.
Yeah, which is also you can't get over that, And.
It's also why our poop is so gross, because half of that bacteria is alive and could make you sick if it was the right type of bacteria or if it was opportunistic and I can't wait for you to tell us more about that. And then the rest of it is fiber insoluble plant matter, undigestive sugars, undigested protein, whatever other stuff, and then some cells in mucus. The rest of that fifty percent, and the breakdown depends on
what you're eating. But Aaron, unless you have any other questions, I'm going to transition to you.
Okay, I mean, I just okay, So there's so much back to I just didn't that's incredible.
I know.
Oh, I do have a question about just like water in general. So you know, obviously we're drinking a lot of water. How does dehydration play a role in poop formation?
Huge role, especially in constipation. So, like the biggest, one of the biggest risks with diarrhea is that your colon is not absorbing that water, and so you're at really high risk of dehydration because now you're losing one to two liters of water or more depending on how much you're pooping. And so that's a huge risk of diarrhea. And so if you are dehydrated, your colon is still going to absorb ninety percent or more of the water
that is left in or colon. But if you are dehydrated to begin with, then you're not drinking as much water. There's not as much water making it there, and so that's why you're at risk of constipation. Got it? Yep? My second episode is now also done. Just kidding, So I'm going to just end this by saying, if we think back again to what our poop is made out of, right, Yes,
it's bacteria, it's plant matter, it's fats and proteins. If you go even more nitty gritty on it, our poop is hydrogen and oxygen, sure water, carbon, nitrogen, especially from the bacteria, and undigestive protein. And then there's some amount of inorganic matter that we haven't used or that came from these cells, like iron and calcium and phosphate. There's salts. So really, aerin poop is just the building blocks of life.
Uh duh.
So tell me about how animals use it?
Oh, I can't wait, I cannot wait.
Okay, we have.
So many names for poop, so many names. There's excrement, which comes from the Latin to separate or sift out. H turd I loved it comes from similar meanings which I find interesting to split flay, torn off the body. Crap originates from the word for residue, specifically from rendered fat.
I love the word crap.
I do too. I think turd is still but like crap is more versatile, right like a crap.
Yeah, I can my two year old saying, and it just cracks me up.
There's fee sees, which is from the Latin for sediment or dregs. Stool. I don't need to take us on that animalogical journey. It's it's longer, but it basically is like thrown as part of it, which I find fast, like like thrown like toilet. Yeah, it's like, okay, fine, I'll take I'll take us on this journey. It starts as seat for one person, as in like thrown, and then to the other stool that we think of today, you know, like the just a stool, like the little
stool to then privy to then poop. Huh yeah, interesting, dung all manure.
Poop.
Do you want to know where poop comes from? It comes from the okay, does not come from poop deck, which I think is a comics swabbing the deck. Those are not the same, not the same etymological origin. I think so poop probably comes from the Middle English word poopen poopin referring to the sound a horn makes, which then became fart fart, and then through automatopoeia became poop poop, and and then there are so many words that we use to describe animal poop droppings, scat which means any
wild animal poop, guano, bat and bird poop. So much Yep, bring out the guano.
This is some bat guano. Again, thank you to the San Diego Natural Museum. We've got some carnivor poop.
Carnivor poop.
Look at that. It's so gross it is.
Yeah, yep, that's carnivor poop. There's frass, which is like inside was Yeah, yep, sprint. Oh, I haven't heard that otter poop specifically.
I'm sorry. I don't have an example of.
I I just was like, wait, so then I was like exactly, so, I don't know. I tried to look up others, like species specific names for poop, and I couldn't really find very many. I didn't do a huge search. I mean, just cubic poop. That's all really I know about that. I don't think that's that's not that's not the name. But perhaps the most versatile word for poop is shi t.
I have a non explicit rating us so we're not going to say, we're not going to say it.
But like I do love so it shares a similar kind of etymological origin as excrement and turd. It comes from this idea of separation from the body, which also means it shares an origin with the word science. Really need to like separate one thing from another.
Huh, so that's so interesting.
And science have the same well not poop. Excrement and science have the same origin. Ish actually shi t but anyway, so but like, yeah, sahi t has so many different We can attach that word to like shoot the bull, you know, chicken, whatever, I love it, I blank my pants, that kind of thing. But there is no shortage of the ways to refer to the gut derived waste that
we leave behind. But none of these words properly convey the respect and a preciation that poop truly deserves, even the word waste, which is one of our more like, you know, polite words for poop means something of no use, something you don't want, something that you like, You're like, well, I don't need this, get it away from me. Can
that be said for poop? I mean, as a species, we have devised massive, intricate sewer systems, true feats of engineering to increase the distance between us and poop feces. Poop elicits a feeling of disgust universally across all cultures, probably evolutionarily ingrained because avoidance of feces would also help to avoid diseased. So yes, not wanting to be around poop is reasonable, it's adaptive. But labeling it as waste
really only tells one part of the story. Poop as a problem to deal with, And that's the story that I'm going to tell more of next week. But this week my goal is to shine a more appreciative light on this dark matter.
Dark matter, that's another good one.
There's a book I stole that from that it's called The Other Dark Matter. But because without poop, and especially the creatures that repurpose it, our planet would be a vastly different place, a lifeless empty shell. So we have a lot to thank poop for. Yeah, and this is we had a parasite appreciation Hour at one point this is the poop appreciation Hour.
Oh I love it. I'm here for it. Yes, let's appreciate some poop.
Let's appreciate it. Okay, here we go. When I started traveling to Panama to do field work for my PhD, I picked up the book Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miata, And by now I've forgotten most of what I learned in that book, but there was one piece of advice that has stuck with me. If you want to see the forest come to life, watch what happens after you poop in the woods. Okay, I'm reading a quote from this quote. After nature calls, do not
beat a hasty, embarrassed treat, but sit quietly nearby. The earliest contestants will arrive soon after you settle down. First are the tiny dung scareb beetles and metallic otitted flies. The later arrivals are larger and behaviorally more complex scaub beetles. Upon landing, they embark on a series of maneuvers designed to secure a private cache of food that they will either eat themselves or barter for copulatory rites. While the scarabs are carting away dung, long sleek stapho linid beetles
arrive on the scene. Agile and voracious. They burrow under the dung mass in search of their prey. Of all the dung deposited in tropical rainforest, human scat is the most avidly sought and the most quickly removed. More than fifty species of dung scabs may converge on a pile of our manure before it is gone species.
I don't even think I knew there were that many species of dung beetles.
Oh there are, do I have it. We'll see lots, lots, many more than fifty species. Isn't that great?
Yeah?
I love that. So anyway, that is the piece of advice that I will also say, do this, do this.
Do poop in those woods, Do poop in the woods, poop in the woods in the tropics specifically, Like, does it have to be tropics?
No, there are poop. There are dung beetles on every continent except Antarctica.
Wow.
Yeah, they I mean, they really are the unsung heroes of poop. I mean, in fact, all heroes of poop, including like the microbes and the fungi and the and they're so cute. They're all unsung, right, because no one really appreciates no. Dung beetles. They do the environment, Yeah, because without them, we would be buried in the stuff. Because they take our waste product and they use it themselves or they turn it into something that other organisms
like plants can use. Case in point Australia in the years following European colonization. Dung beetles are globally distributed, like I said, every continent except Antarctica, but they can be
pretty picky about the poop that they utilize. When cattle were introduced to Australia by Europeans, the dung beetles there, which had evolved on a diet of marsupial poop, primarily were not interested in this new cattle dung, and the poop began to accumulate at a rate that approached thirty three million tons per year just mounds.
It's like so much poop that you can't I can imagine.
Yeah. I'll talk a little bit about more other poop quantities that there's better visualizations, but this one, I don't have a good one for huge, huge, huge pest fly populations grew out of control and grazing land shrink because the cattle were like, I'm not going to graze near these towering piles of maneuver. That's grosss Yeah, And after about one hundred and eighty years of this, the government decided that they just couldn't take it anymore. I mean,
that's like when the first cows were important. Okay, but still yeah, the first fleet. Yeah, so between between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen eighty two, in a move that I find shocking considering the issues that introduced species have caused in the past. Guess what Australia did.
Introduce some dung beetles.
They did fifty five different species of dung beetles, primarily from Southern Africa. I know, risky whisky.
But it paid off.
It paid off. About eight species took hold and since have been relatively successful in restoring some of the Australian pasture.
It's that's so interesting. Have we ever done an episode that's just focused on the introduced species issues. We haven't. It's very outside of our and yet inside of our personal interest.
We should do that. Let's do fire ants. Okay, okay, all right, done, done, But these dung beetles, I mean, it just showed how integral they are in the poop cycle, and what valueabill work they perform. So for about fifteen percent of the Earth's ice free surface is used for agriculture, and that translates into a lot of livestock dung, much of which is handled by dung beetles and other decomposers. In two thousand and six, that's that's like, it's twenty
years ago. But you know it's fine. Dung Beetle contributions to the US beef cattle industry alone were estimated at three hundred and eighty million dollars per year.
And no one's paying them.
No one's paying them. They're getting paid in poopt, paid and poop and they're happy about that.
They're through.
Yeah. By reintegrating dung into the landscape, dung beetles are helping to fertilize the soil cycle. Nutrients distribute seeds both reduce and distribute parasites, which have a role in ecosystems as well.
We still appreciate parents.
I love parasites. They control pest fly populations. Some are even pollinators. Yeah, I don't know how, so don't ask.
That's fine.
For the past forty million years, dung beetles have been bringing new meaning to the phrase one man's trash is another's treasure.
God, I love it.
Yeah, over five thousand species there it is, I do have it. Five thousand species, five thousand species. I mean it makes sense though, because like think about niche differentiation.
Like no, but just of dung beetles. Dung beetles, Oh, insects are so cool, I know, okay.
We are, oh speaking of if you are watching on YouTube, we have these sweet dung beetle shirts.
Shout out to Yu see Davis and entomology.
And there are very There are other cute shirts that we saw there too, but we just had to have these.
Dog thank you for selling them.
Yes, but yeah. Among dung beetles, there are rollers that transport balls of dung to later bury under the soil. There are tunnelers which bury the dung close to where it fell. There are dwellers which live in the poop or brewed. They're young in the poop mm hmm. And dung beetles are not innovators, right like they didn't inherit a planet that was piled high with poop. They are carrying on a tradition that is foundational to life as we know it, whereby quote unquote, waste is in the
eye of the beholder. For the earliest microbes, oxygen was thought it was waste, right, it was a toxic byproduct. Carbon dioxide was king and then came along the aerobic bacteria, for whom oxygen was not just like weight. It wasn't just not waste, but it was essential essential.
Deep.
I mean, that's like as deep as we're going to go, just a little bit of a dive in the backup of it. But what one organism produces as waste, another views as an opportunity. For us, we may view the poop that we produce as waste and nothing more, like get this away from me. It stinks, it's gross, it's gonna make me sick. But for dung beetles and flies and earthworms and soil microbes and fungi, our poop is
a rich substance packed full of nutrients. It's a place to raise your young, to make your mark, and to do your part to reuse and recycle.
I love imagining them like telling their kids this, like, okay, kids, get right on the family biz. One kid is like dad, can we just eat like broccoli.
Yeah, but we really don't give these organisms, these king midases of the world, enough credit for transforming our waste into a pile of gold. That waste comes in all shapes and sizes. From the cube shaped poop of a wombat, which is something to do, is just the way that.
It they're colon, Yeah.
To the kidney shaped dung of a horse, the pellets of rabbits.
I did not know that horse poop is shaped like a kidney, like.
A bean beanish, yeah, beanie, yeah, to the cylindrical tubes of carnivores and us and us and omnivores. Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, I don't know if all omnivores have cylindrical poop. There are generalizations that we can make, and there are exceptions to everything.
There's probably a bristol stool scale for every animal.
Just kidding well, I was actually thinking that they probably should, right like there would be because a sick rabbit probably wouldn't produce my dog's poop ranges, Oh god, in texture, and I'm like, how am I supposed to get this off in the grass?
It is just embedded in especially the second or third poop of the walk.
It's just like you know, when it's a third poop and you're just like, please, don't, just please, there's nothing at least, yeah, you can wipe it. On second thought, I'm glad we don't have more pictures for this episode thing. But the variation in poop across the animal kingdom is so vast that you might wonder if there are any real common threads, And it turns out that there are so. By modeling how different species pooped, some researchers conclude that the magic number for poop duration.
Is twelve seconds.
Yeah.
I found this paper, Aaron, and I told my whole family about it, and now my kid counts every time he goes to the bath and me. He's like yeah, and I'm like, it's been more than twelve seconds, bro, I've been coming.
My dog and I'm like seven, are you okay?
Yeah, but it was twelve plus or minus seven seconds.
That was the twelve plus or minus seven second I mean, okay, that's still like quite a small range just in terms of yeah, because it was like from elephants to rabbits or something.
Oh yeah, give it to me.
So like, okay, elephants poop fifteen pounds a day fifteen pounds pounds, yeah, oh my gosh, which is one hundred times more than a dog poops.
Hm. Wow.
Uh.
Elephants poop at a rate of three inches per second, keep going. Dog poop at about a rate ofo point five inches per second.
Okay, so it's a much smaller volume, smaller but same rate, same and humans are like just under an inch a second.
Although, so are humans actually pooping twelve seconds? Absolutely not.
We'll talk about it.
We'll talk me about that next week. But they're both like, how how is an elephant pooping fifteen pounds and a dog poopy? You know, like, how are they all pooping?
The poop from like the time that it exits the anus until the time it's done on the floor is twelve seconds plus or minus from an elephant to a dog to a dog?
True?
Wow?
Even yeah?
How how the mucus? The mucus is the mucus that lines are intestines. It keeps everything moving along, getting there, getting out there smoothly. I just love this so much, So glad that you also found a twelve second Yes, that's all I have for like the commonalities.
Though for changed my life forever though me too. Oh We're going to talk more about it next week. The twelve seconds will come up. I guess the number is the magic number. We should be able to poop in twelve seconds because we have cylindrical poops, just like all of these mammals that they model.
I mean fiber. Is that the bottom line.
Paper was out of Georgia Tech. For a second, I thought it was also out of Davis, and I was going to give them another shadow, but it was Georgia Tech.
I don't know. I read it book I found because I was still loved it. I need to know more. But yeah, as far as commonality is like, that's all I've got fascinating. But the scent, the shape, the color, texture, and location of poop, they vary so much across the animal kingdom, and they can tell us about the animal that produced it and the kind of life that it is leading. Okay, right, so scent can tell us what
the animal ate. Carnivore poop tends to smell much worse to us than herb of war poop to us, although scent is definitely again in the nose of the beholder, right Like, yes, as anyone who has had a dog can attest watching as their dog rolls in something unspeakably foul. I'm just like why why? Still, there are a lot of reasons why. Actually, scent is a really powerful method of communication. So, for instance, it can alert a predator
to prey species nearby. This is one reason why your dog might be rolling in poop just to be like I'm not I'm not a prey, yeah, or like I am you know mighty predators smell my body, my own feces. Yeah, so it might be like a disguising of scent. Sharks apparently can recognize the poop of seals and humans and have may use it as a queue to like, oh, there's prey nearby certain sharks. Wow.
Yeah, I feel like you hear so much about how much sharks can scent blood, you know, like they can sense blood. But I never thought about them using poop as a That makes sense because it would just be floating in the right interesting.
And also poop would tell you more about the individual animal than.
Blood and just blood yeah right, blood is just I mean, I'm sure.
Blood is also a cue, but like, yeah, poop apparently too juicy juicy seal yep up ahead to the right, take a left at the booi.
I don't know.
Yeah. Some species bury their poop or they shoot their poop in a projectile manner to throw predators if the trail butterflies do this called fresh shooting.
Oh my gosh, yeah, yep.
The smell of poop can also signal to other members of your species, like, hey, this is mine, this is my territory. Paws off. Big cats do that, hippo, Yeah, and also hippos do this. Big cats do this. Yeah, Okay, their they'll tails will be like helicopters, and they're.
Like just like just getting their over the little spot.
Some species have specialized glands that leave concentrated sense like dogs. They might even have Other species have communal latrines where they all go poop. It's kind of like a very stinky message board, like hey, what's everyone up to? Who's down to like party this weekend? There. I don't think they hang out. I'm can just poop and walk away. Yeah. Certain infections might make poop have a distinctive smell like seed iff kind of warns like, hey, this is I'm
not I'm not good. Yeah, don't roll in this. And for those species that have a keen sense of smell. Poop is a rich source of formation, and we humans have harnessed that power for our own data gathering. What oh yeah, tell me so. There are several researchers that have trained dogs to search for and alert to the poops of certain species to help with like estimating biodiversity or where animals are distributed in a region, things like
territory size, habitat preference, diet composition, and so on. It's hard for us to find poop in a landscape, but a dog.
Is, like, they know exactly where it is.
You just got to train to not roll in it.
So they use the dogs to find the poop and then they examine them.
They'll look at the poop yet.
Yeah fascinating. Yeah, that's so cool.
There are even whale poop sniffing dogs. Whale poop whale poop sniffing dogs. Oh yeah, whale poop is I cut a huge There was like a quote about the different fl likes, colors, and shapes that whale poop can come in.
About it, Do the dog sniff the whale poop on the like when it washes up on the shore.
I think they go on boats.
They go on boats and they can sniff it from the.
Water, I think because it's pretty diffuse, like it'll just coo yeah, and like.
A plume whale poop so much.
And so there are some dogs that will, like I think it's orcs specifically that they'll like track individual whales to be like okay, let's now test the water or test the poop, and like let's check their health. Oh my god, I know that's so cool. I don't know.
I don't know.
And so we may not be able to smell as well as our canine companions, but once we get our hands on some poop, there is really like no end to what we can tell. So, Aaron, you took us through the Bristol stool scale. But that's just one species. Consider the variation that you might find if you are tracking a bear, a black bear throughout throughout the course of a year, right, Like where does that bear live on the east, you know, in the east, on the west,
north or south? How does that influence its diet? Is it a cicada year? Is it living in a more urban environment and digging in trash? Or is it just like total wilderness? Is it eating huckleberries or blackberries, fish or squirrels. You know, like there's is it an older bear or a baby bear? There are there parasites, is it stressed? I mean, poop is an informational pile of gold.
Even if we don't know who's poop we've just stumbled upon on a hike in the woods, we can usually make some guesses based on its shape or its size. Carnivores tend to poop less than herbivores. Their scat often will contain like hair or bones, and so if you see that, you're like, oh, carnivor, and it comes in a more cylindrical shape. Herbivores, on the other hand, poop way more and their poop tends to be floatier with
plant material. So that's carnivor. If you're twoing an on YouTube, we have some samples some herbivor poop, some herbi bore poop. So that's like mountain lion and rabbit right there. And yeah, so like the herb over poop, it's like floating or poop. There's plant material, and that it could vary from like sheep pellets to cow pies and so on, And it depends in part on how much moisture an animal retains.
Of course, of course we know.
So for example, we think of these rabbit pellets as little hard balls. But rabbits also produce another type of poop that is softer and more nutrient dense, and we don't really see this type of poop because they produce it in their dens and they typically eat it straight away right from the source.
They eat it themselves.
They eat it themselves. I mean a lot of animals will eat their baby's poop too, and that's for a number of reasons. Part it's like re extraction of nutrients. And it's not just rabbits. It's a lot mice, cows,
termites sometimes again it's like nutrient reabsorption. Cows will tell you in a second it could be to conceal the poop of their offspring from predators or some researchers, especially when it comes to cows, think it might be a strategy to refresh the gut microbiota during about of intestinal disease. So like when cows are really showing like not good poops, will sometimes eat it to be like do I need to get something like that?
That's so interesting? Like why would you want to eat the poop? You would think like, let me eat my friends poop.
Yeah.
If my friend's not pooping bad and I'm pooping bat, I'll eat my friends poop. Yeah.
Let's find the best cap I hear they and make a little meal.
They eat their own I.
Think they eat their own.
Yeah.
And before we turn up our noses at this, it's probably too late. Some of the most expensive coffee in the world is made from beans that have passed through the bowels of a palm. Civet civit coffee. Coffee. Yeah, Kobe luwak, it's the civic coffee. It's not the only prized Pooh products. Okay, there's also ambergriss.
Ambergriss? What is that?
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I am so glad you asked. I'm just gonna tell you anyway, but well tell me that we're asking. For over a thousand years, ambergriss has been one of the most valuable and sought after natural substances. What is it? It is a hardened mass of fecal material and undigested squid beaks that forms in the intestines and rectum of about five percent of sperm whales.
Sorry, yeah, let.
Me know if you need me to reread.
That, can you just so that I can really sure?
Okay, hardened mass of fecal material and undigested squid beaks.
They're just chunks of yeah.
That forms in the intestines and rectum of about five percent of sperm whales five percent.
So it's basically constipated sperm whale rectal mass exactly. And people eat this or oh, they do.
All kinds of things with it, okay. So the reason that it like forms into a hard mass, so of course sperm whales eat squids. They can't digest their beaks, and so usually they'll vomit the beaks up. That is your strategy. Because whale poop is liquid, and if some get through all the way, it just gets stuck.
It's like a beez or exactly. Yeah.
And so because the the poop, like the rectum can't relax enough to let the poop or to let the squid beaks through, and so then it just sort of forms and forms into these beaks will mold together formatively, is masturpated. It's like a hardened ball of huge chunk of hardened whale poop and squidbeaks, and what happens there's kind of two different schools with thought. One is that finally the rectum relaxes enough to let it out. The person whose book I read was like, I don't think
that happens. I think that it bursts and the whale dies.
The whale dice. Yeah, so people aren't killing sperm whales to get this. I mean, I know they killed them.
There was they would have, and they probably did for a while. So for a long time this was called floating gold because people were just finding it on the surfaces of the ocean and they were like, this smells amazing. This is like we could use this for everything. Yeah, listen possibly, oh, I mean yeah. Uh and so but then it was when whaling kind of picked up in the seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds that people finally were like, they would kill a whale and be like, oh my god, it's ambergriss.
Can you believe it? They kicked it out.
Yeah, so that's the most Finally it was like the different theories like, oh, I think it's what I can't remember some.
Of the series.
Okay, they used it for medicine, a condiment an aphrodisiac, and it is still today incorporated as a fixative and a musky scent in perfumes. Fixative meaning like it makes the smell like the scent stay stronger. So it's still
used today. And it is I mean floating gold. So there was a chunk of ambergris found in nineteen fourteen that weighed four hundred and fifty five kilograms massive, massive, and it sold then in nineteen fourteen for twenty three thousand pounds, which in today's money is three point four million pounds or four and a half million dollars, so that it's more in gold. It's more than gold. Actually, I don't know if that is definitely.
Not right, but okay, uh, this is I am fascinating you. If we like checked on the back of like a perfume bottle, and if it says ambergriss on it, that means it is it is constipated sperm whale.
I mean I've never I've never looked at the back of a perfume bottle and saw a list of ingredients. But I think you would probably be able to find perfumes that contain ambergriss. Do you want to know what it smells like?
Yes? Okay.
According to a New Scientist article, it has a rich and complex odor consisting of quote, fine tobacco, the wood of old churches, the smell of the tide, sandalwood, fresh earth, and seaweed in the sun.
I believe seaweed fresh tide, because let me tell you, I've smelled a lot.
Of my life.
I want it to be fine tobacco in the wood of old churches stecifically.
That's quite specific.
What about an old shirt? You know, there's how old?
I don't. I don't have any answer.
I don't either, I have no answers. I mean, I'm left totally baffled. Still, Okay, Ambergris and Kobe Luoc done. They may be treasured as poop novelties. Are you ready to move on from Ambergris? Are you ever going to be ready? Good? Twelve seconds as But these two, they're not the only way that poop can be used. Poop can be used as fuel, as insulation, as insect repellent, as fertilizer, as building material, as paper. One elephant can produce enough dung in one day to make one hundred
and fifteen sheets of paper. How do you make paper from fiber from the undigested cool plant material?
And people doing that can I buy elephant poop.
Paper google it? Okay, yeah, well you know we will after this, we'll make some Yeah, we can DNA test it to determine the diet of an animal or catch a criminal. This was done by matching DNA of dog feces at the scene of a crime to dog poop on the suspect shoe.
Oh fascinating, isn't that wild? Yeah?
I mean talking about like spinking outside the box.
Coming from that dog. It was that same pile of poop. Yep, shcause they.
Saw it, Like I think in the crime scene photos there was like a yeah, like a shmear like the dog poop smear, and then someone had it.
Yeah, that's why you gotta clean your shoes.
I mean, or just like not you know, murder people. But yeah, you choose. But poop is so crucial ecologically in seed dispersal and parasite transmission. But the most important role of poop is in nutrient redistribution. Critters like dung beetles that move and berry poop soil microbes that transform it into plant food. Animals like hippos and otters that live in water and on land, and they move nutrients across those boundaries. Oh interesting, whales that beat at lower
depth and then rise to poop and breathe. They redistribute nutrients across that depth. Fish poop and whale poop that helps to offset ocean acidification. Like, all of these are critical players in the poop nutrient cycle, but we humans are making it harder for them to do their work. As a planet, we are producing more poop than we have ever before produced for more people and more animals, livestock, more livestock. Yeah, and it's not even across the landscape.
History has never seen the likes of the factory farming that exists throughout the world today. Okay, I'm gonna give you some numbers. So in nineteen sixty one, there were approximately four hundred million pigs, nine hundred and forty million cows around the world around the world, one point three billion sheep and goats, and three point nine billion chickens.
Just over sixty years later, in twenty twenty three, which is the most recent data I could find, we are at one billion pigs, which is more than double, one point six billion cattle from nine to forty million, two point two billion sheep and goats, and from three point nine billion chickens in nineteen sixty one, we're at twenty nine billion chickens.
And we wonder why bird flu?
Do we wonder why bird flu? We know exactly why bird flu? Yeah, oh my god. And humans have more than doubled over that time, from three billion to eight billion.
But all of those numbers were like more than double over the amount of humans.
Yes, yeah, each of us humans poops about one percent of our body weight a day, so one of our entire selves every few months.
Wow, we poop our weight every few months.
Each year, Domestic animals produce about eight trillion pounds of poop, which is ten thousand Empire state buildings or seven hundred Great Pyramids of Giza.
You can't poop, can't. I can't poop.
That's the best visualization because we can even still, how do we? How do we envision envisions? And I can envision the single Empire states? I know.
That's how much poop. That's more than New York City worth of poop?
Oh my gosh, yeah, oh I think, Oh, next episode, I have a New York City statistic. But that excess poop, that incredible amount of poop that we are pooping now it doesn't translate into more dung beetles and more nutrient dense soils. Like I mentioned at the top, dung beetles can be picky about the pooh they use, but even those that, like cattle poop are under threat because of the pesticides that livestock are treated with, like ivermectin, which is then like excreted in their poop and is toxic
to dung beetles. And so there are like dung beetle they are like threatened dung beetles, or like deforestation can also reduce dung beetle.
Relate on other things too, exactly.
Yeah, and I'm singling out dung beetles because they're really charismatic, you know, our shirts, like you know, who else would want poop on a shirt? But this ripples far beyond dung beetle populations, Like we are facing a global poop catastrophe, too much of it and in all the wrong places. Potastrophe, cock catastrophe. No, actually, I like that, did you say?
Yeah, a catastrophe that's very funny, Thank you. Wow.
But you know, in the past when poop has come up on this podcast, it's mostly been in the context of like public health, right, Like that wrong place has been in our water or our food supplies. But that's just one component. What about our farm runoff, our waterways, our pasture lands leeched of nutrients, and the poop just going down the river?
Right?
And so I wanted to use these two episodes to approach poop from a different perspective than the typical public health one that we usually go with. It's one where we suspend our disgust and we consider what poop represents not as a waste, but as a hugely valuable substance. And hopefully today I have left you with a little bit more appreciation for crap, or at least some fun
facts to share. Twelve seconds Ambergris And next week I'll go into how we attempted to solve our poop problem over the centuries and what the future of waste management might hold. And that's all I've got for you today on poop. I love it, except for sources erin.
That was so much fun.
I'm glad.
I know.
Well that's good because we have another episode next week.
Perfect yay, Oh wow, that was really good. We should tell everyone where they could read more.
Of There is so much I mean, narrowing down the narrative for poop was impossible, ridiculous. Yeah, and so there is so much more out there that you can read. Let me tell you a few examples. So a couple of books, one by Joe Roman called Eat, Poop Dye, How Animals Make Our worlds?
Poop Die, Poop Die? What else do you do?
And then another on this is I think my favorite title of a book that I've come across lately. So it's by David Waltner. Tow's The Origin of Feces.
The Origin of Feces, so.
Good, it's good. And then there's a paper by Robert Clark The Origin of ambergris, and then by Nicols at All from twenty from two thousand and eight Ecological Functions and Ecosystem Services provided by Scarabina Da dung Beetles. I love it, and more on the website.
Yeah, my sources are not as much like fun because I mostly used a textbook that was incredibly boring, but shout out to the people who wrote it because it was quite useful. It was called the Digestive System from Basic Scientis to Clinical Practice. I didn't read the whole thing. It was like four hundred plus pages, but it's quite useful, so especially if you want more about poop. I also
have a few different papers here. There's the Characterization of Feces in Urine, A review of the literature to inform Advanced treatment technology. I actually really loved that. It was a paper from twenty fifteen in Critical Reviews and Environmental Science and Technology by Rose at All. And then there was a paper that I or a book that I only read part of, but I really enjoyed the parts that I read, so I'm going to give it a shout out. It was called Flush, The Remarkable Science of
an Unlikely Treasure. Did you read that book? No? It was good, it was interesting.
Wow, I looked up so many poop books.
I don't I came across this book, but I enjoyed the parts that I read. But there's a whole bunch more. Uh yeah, there's literally so many more. We'll post them all on our website, this post dot com.
We will. We will thank you again to the provider of our first hand account.
It's I think I can't express enough thank you so much for sharing that story with this. I will cry laughing thinking about it once again.
Oh yes, me too. Thank you also to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
Thank you to everyone and Exactly Right one, including everyone here today and Tom and Leanna and Brent and Pete and everybody who's involved in every is possible.
It's amazing. And thank you to you listeners for listening and watching. Yeah, however you partake in this podcast, we appreciate, appreciate it.
Please subscribe to the Exactly Right YouTube channel or us on the podcasters that you like. Yeah, we don't say that enough. We don't say but it helps us, so thank you for doing it.
We just say that a lot.
You're right, we do.
And thank you also to our fantastic patrons. We really appreciate your support. You mean the world.
Yes, truly, truly, thank you.
Yeah, until next time, wash your hair out, you filthy animals.