Bare-nosed wombats can excrete four to eight scat pieces at a time and may poop up to 100 cubes a day 😱. After the wombat defecates, the furry critter collects the two centimeter-sized cubes and places them around their territory, possibly to communicate with other wombats or attract mates, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.
In 2018, study co-author Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineer at Georgia 🇬🇪 Institute of Technology, and her team previously found that the cube-shaped poop formed at the end of the wombat’s digestive process and that the wombat’s intestinal wall contained elastic-like properties, reports Gizmodo.
To build on those results and fully understand how the wombat’s soft intestinal walls created sharp cube-like edges in the 💩, Yang and her team dissected two wombats and examined the texture and structure of the intestinal tissue, reports Tess Joosse for Science. A 2-D mathematical model created from the wombat’s intestinal tract showed how the organ expanded and contracted during digestion—and eventually squeezed out the excrement, reports Science.
“A cross-section of the wombat’s intestine is like a rubber band with two ends kept slightly taut and the center section drooping. The rigid and elastic parts contract at different speeds, which creates the cube shape and corners,”
~Patricia Yang 💁🏻♀️.
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