Does Excrement Actually Taste Bad?

[Gawdzilla_Sama]

If smell was legit warning trigger and not a learned trigger nobody would eat balut.

Don’t google that if you’re easily barfed.

[Sheldon]

Not sure my objections are entirely based on its effect on my olfactory senses. Someone told me they sell more balut in the far east, then we sell burgers in the west, I don’t know if it’s true, but it does seem to be very popular, who knows why.

[Gawdzilla_Sama]

“Thousand year old eggs”, yeah, big deal in the Far East, but then fugu is more of a sport than a meal. There’s no accounting for taste.

[mordant]

Sorry to re-up this old crap (lol) but one of our dogs likes “poopcicles” – eats his own frozen poop this time of year. Doesn’t seem to care for it when it’s room temperature.

He’s a rather extreme “beta” dog and our vet explains that in the wild a beta will eat its own scat to erase any trace that it’s been around, lest some alpha consider it a territorial intrusion. I have no idea if that’s really true. BUT …

… he gave us a product called FOR-BID which is a powder you put on their food once a day for a few days and it’s supposed to stop them. It did work for awhile – I need to pick some more up and give him another dose I suppose.

From what I gather from the packaging, it’s basically just monosodium glutamate and whey powder. Putting that together with that the dog only eats frozen poop, I presume that poop does taste bad, even to him, and surfacing that taste with a flavor enhancer even in frozen poop makes him stop.

As a side benefit … not eating poop improves his breath. A lot.

[Calilasseia]

Coprophagy is one of those bizarre traits that surfaces in unlikely places, as the caterpillars specialising in koala and sloth dung readily establish. Likewise the odd digestive habits of rabbits.

Though there’s a beetle known weirdly as the Maid of Kent, a member of the UK fauna covered in more detail here. Scroll down until you hit the hilarious heading “The Poo Police”.

[Calilasseia]

And now, just when you thought you’d escaped the shit thread, it’s back to haunt you. Muhahahahahaha …

Several here may already know that Wombats are famous for producing cube shaped poo. Several here well not be surprised to find that I’ve alighted upon a scientific paper, whose authors decided to investigate the phenomenon.

You’re all going to love this.

The paper in question is published in a journal whose title is - wait for it - Soft Matter. I kid you not. Which is apparently a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Better still, I found a link to a free download of the paper, namely this link. Click on that and enjoy the wonderful and wacky world of the mathematical modelling of Wombat intestines. Yes, the authors constructed a mathematical model of the Wombat’s guts, and used that model to determine that unique aspects of the Wombat’s colon allow the marsupial to shape its poo - UK readers of this post will be delighted to know that we now have reasons why Wombats shit Oxo cubes.

From the paper, we have such gems as this:

In this study we investigate cube formation in the wombat using dissections, material measurements, and mathematical modeling. We begin in Section 2 with the histological and tensile experiments performed on wombat intestine samples as well as 2D phenomenological modeling informed by these experiments. In Section 3, we discuss the implications of our work and provide suggestions for future research. In Section 4, we summarize the contributions of our study. In Section 5, we provide the detailed methods.

So the authors got their hands dirty, so to speak, with Wombat dissections. Dissections of wombat crap tubes into the bargain.

Then they moved on.

The wombat intestine of 6–9 m length (approximate length for a fully grown wombat) consists of four sections after the oesophagus: these include the stomach (0.14 m), a relatively short small intestine (3.2 m), long proximal colon (3.9 m) and distal colon (last 1.8 m). Fig. 1d shows the shape of feces with relation to their position in the intestine (lower proximal colon to lower distal colon). In the proximal colon, the feces are a yellow-green slurry of digesta. As the fecal material approaches the anus, it becomes increasingly dry, as shown by the darker color. The beveled edges and flat faces also become increasingly prominent.

So what we have here, is the wombat colon version of Soylent Green?

The removal of water from the feces may help it to better retain its shape. Generally, at higher solid fractions, mammalian feces are more viscous and behave viscoplastically.²² To measure the level of dryness we begin by removing feces samples from both the proximal and distal colons. By weighing a scat, we obtain m_wet, and by drying them in an oven, we obtain m_dry. We define the water content of each sample using w = (m_wet - m_dry)/m_wet. Feces from the proximal colon have a water content of w = 0.81 and show an amorphous shape. Feces from the distal colon, the last 1 m (or 17 percent) of the 6 m digestive tract, have a much lower water content of w = 0.53. This water content is lower than many mammals: for example, humans have a fecal water content of w = 0.74.²³

This is followed shortly by:

To understand the formation of the cubes, we hang an intact intestine vertically allowing the bottom end to swing and rotate freely. We observe that the corners of the cubes are aligned, suggesting that the intestine itself has a coordinate system to dictate corner formation. We hypothesize that this coordinate system is written in the intestines in terms of its thickness and its material properties. To explore this idea, we turn to histology and material testing.

Basically, the authors determined that the Wombat intestine is anisotropic with respect to both wall thickness and tensile rigidity, and that the unique arrangement of these properties in said passage facilitates the shaping of the cubic poo, as it passes from one end to the other.

Oh, and I just have to present this screenshot from the paper:

I have to admit, that even with my background, I did not expect to see discussion of the Reynolds number of Wombat poo.

Now, at this juncture, none of the authors commented upon taste, presumably because they had other, more pressing concerns to attend to before publication of the paper. But seeing a selection of Wombat poos arranged like a smorgasbord on page 481 gives pause for thought in connection with the title of this thread, though I note this is accompanied on the same page by a fairly intricate equation for the Reynolds number of Wombat poo:

This post, of course, could have been a candidate for the FAFO thread as well, but I thought I’d reserve quality shit flinging for here.