How much time do you devote to thinking about poop? I don’t mean your own personal poop, or even the poop of your personal pets. I mean poop as a phenomenon that spans the natural world. Meta-poop, if you will. Almost every living thing out there takes in some form of nourishing substance, and a little while later says Aloha to the unneeded bits. And the organisms on our little space marble have evolved a startling array of defecatory diversity. Let’s take a gander at few of the many crappy ways Nature has found to move the mail, and what to do with the mail once it has reached journey’s end. Throughput When animals do the doo-doo, it can hit town in shapes and conditions that give one pause. Take wild turkeys. A male of the type produces J-shaped turds, while a female’s deposit is shaped rather like an obese Slinky with a melanin disorder. Some snake poo is readily identifiable, not just because it contains bits of bone and hair, but because it greets the world as an ob...
"Into wilderness people travel in search of new life and wonder… Wilderness settles peace on the soul because it needs no help; it is beyond human contrivance." – Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life