INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightEPAImage caption
The Australian native produces up to 100 cube-shaped poops a night
Scientists say they have uncovered how and why wombats produce cube-shaped poo - the only known species to do so.The Australian marsupial
can pass up to 100 deposits of poop a night and they use the piles to mark territory
The shape helps it stop rolling away.Despite having round anuses like other mammals, wombats do not produce round pellets, tubular coils or
messy piles.Researchers revealed on Sunday the varied elasticity of the intestines help to sculpt the poop into cubes."The first thing that
drove me to this is that I have never seen anything this weird in biology
That was a mystery," Georgia Institute of Technology's Patricia Yang said.After studying the digestive tracts of wombats put down after road
accidents in Tasmania, a team led by Ms Yang presented its findings at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics' annual
meeting in Atlanta."We opened those intestines up like it was Christmas," said co-author David Hu, also from Georgia Tech, according to
Science News.The team compared the wombat intestines to pig intestines by inserting a balloon into the animals' digestive tracts to see how
it stretched to fit the balloon.In wombats, the faeces changed from a liquid-like state into a solid state in the last 25% of the intestines
- but then in the final 8% a varied elasticity of the walls meant the poop would take shape as separated cubes.This, the scientists explain,
resulted in 2cm (0.8in) cube-shaped poops unique to wombats and the natural world.The marsupial then stacks the cubes - the higher the
better so as to communicate with and attract other wombats."We currently have only two methods to manufacture cubes: We mould it, or we cut
Now we have this third method," Ms Yang said
"It would be a cool method to apply to the manufacturing process," she suggested, "how to make a cube with soft tissue instead of just
