50 Fun Facts About Poop

Roughly what proportion of fresh human faeces is water?

Of the solid part, up to half can be bacterial biomass.

Up to what share of the solid matter in faeces is bacterial biomass?

The rest is undigested plant matter, protein, fat and salts.

What gives faeces its usual brown colour?

Green stool can mean bile passed through too fast to be processed.

What is the medical chart that sorts stools into seven types called?

It was developed at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and published in 1997.

On the Bristol scale, which numbers indicate constipation?

Type 4, the smooth sausage, is considered ideal; some media call it the ghost poop.

Which Bristol number has been dubbed the 'perfect poop' by some media?

Types 3 and 4 are the easiest to pass.

What is a newborn baby's first stool called?

It is tar-like, dark olive green and almost odourless, made of material swallowed in the womb.

Skatole, the main compound behind faecal odour, is used at low concentrations in what?

In small doses it smells flowery, and it occurs naturally in jasmine and orange blossom.

Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?

The 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics went to the researchers who worked out how.

Why is the cube shape of certain marsupial droppings thought to be useful?

Its intestine is believed to have two flexible and two stiff regions that shape them.

How often do three-toed sloths climb down from the trees to defecate?

They dig a hole and cover it afterwards, a risky trip that puzzles biologists.

Kopi luwak, among the world's priciest coffees, uses beans that have passed through which animal?

Wild-collected beans can fetch $1,300 a kilogram, though caged farming has raised welfare concerns.

Kopi luwak originated in the coffee plantations of which country?

Javanese farmers in the 19th century began brewing coffee from beans found in civet droppings.

The male dung beetle Onthophagus taurus can pull how many times its own body weight?

That is like an average person pulling six double-decker buses full of people.

The African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus is the only insect known to navigate by what?

Ancient Egyptians saw the ball-rolling scarab as the god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky.

Which country ran a two-decade project from 1965 to import dung beetles to deal with cattle dung?

CSIRO's George Bornemissza led the effort, bringing species from South Africa and Europe.

Dung beetles are found on every continent except which?

There are more than 5,000 species in the true dung beetle subfamily alone.

Ecologists in 1991 sorted dung beetles into three functional groups. Which of these is one of them?

Rollers roll and bury a ball for food or brooding; usually the male rolls while the female rides along.

What is the scientific term for fossilised faeces?

They were first described by William Buckland in 1829, after Mary Anning noticed 'bezoar stones' inside ichthyosaur skeletons.

Which fossil hunter's observation of stones inside ichthyosaur skeletons revealed them to be fossilised dung?

She noticed as early as 1824 that they often contained fish bones and scales.

The Lloyds Bank specimen, a famous fossilised human stool, was found in 1972 in which English city?

It dates from the 9th-century Viking settlement of Jórvík and was described by an appraiser as 'the most exciting piece of excrement I've ever seen'.

What happened to the famous Viking-age Lloyds Bank specimen in 2003?

It was reconstructed and has been on show at the Jorvik Viking Centre since 2008.

Guano, prized as fertiliser, is the accumulated droppings of which animals?

The word comes from Quechua wanu; the 19th-century guano trade helped launch modern intensive farming.

What 1856 US law let American citizens claim uninhabited islets covered in bird droppings?

Demand collapsed after 1910 when the Haber-Bosch process pulled nitrogen out of the air instead.

Which South American country's guano trade dominated the 19th century, centred on the Chincha Islands?

Alexander von Humboldt brought word of it to Europe in 1802.

What did the Haber-Bosch process do to the guano trade after 1910?

Chile still mines a few thousand tonnes a year.

Rabbits produce and eat soft nutrient packets from their gut called what?

They deliver vitamin B, fatty acids and amino acids that the colon would otherwise miss.

Ambergris, the perfume fixative once worth a fortune, forms in the digestive system of which animal?

Fresh ambergris smells faecal and marine; it is thought to help the whale pass sharp squid beaks.

Whale faeces help fight climate change by fertilising what?

Iron-rich droppings from krill-eating whales feed the plankton that lock away carbon.

In Tudor England, what were the men who emptied cesspits at night called?

They were only allowed to work after dark and had to carry the 'night soil' outside the town.

The word 'gong' in gong farmer comes from an Old English word meaning what?

It was used for both the privy and its contents.

'Night soil' is a historical euphemism for what?

It was hauled away after dark and often sold to farmers as fertiliser.

Manure is used in agriculture mainly to add what to soil?

Green manure and compost count too, but most manure is animal dung.

Purpose-made toilet paper was being mass-produced in which country by the 14th century?

An Arab traveller in 851 AD noted with surprise that the Chinese wiped with paper rather than washing.

Who introduced the first commercial toilet paper in the US in 1857?

His medicated flat sheets were watermarked with his name and sold into the 1920s.

Who obtained the earliest US patents for toilet paper on a roll and its dispenser in 1883?

The Scott Paper Company later popularised roll dispensing.

Roughly how effective is a faecal transplant against recurrent C. difficile infection?

The first oral capsule product, Vowst, was approved in the US in April 2023.

In which year did the US approve the first faecal microbiota product, Rebyota?

Australia approved Biomictra the same month.

Which Australian professor treated the first ulcerative colitis patient with a faecal transplant in 1988?

Unlike C. difficile, colitis usually needs repeated infusions.

Everyone Poops is the English title of a children's book by which Japanese author?

Kane/Miller acquired the US rights to Minna Unchi in 1993.

Coprolites were classed as what kind of fossil, since they show behaviour rather than body form?

Before Buckland named them in 1829 they were called fossil fir cones or bezoar stones.

Preventing the spread of disease by the faecal-oral route is the main goal of what?

Containing human waste is the first line of defence against cholera and typhoid.

What colour is stool likely to be when large amounts of unprocessed bile rush through the gut?

Yellow stool can be a sign of gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Wild bat droppings support entire cave ecosystems. What can happen if the bats leave?

Over-harvesting guano can drive bats to abandon a roost.

Kopi luwak retail prices for wild-collected beans reach roughly what per kilogram?

Farmed beans go for about $100 a kilo.

The word 'faeces' is the plural of the Latin faex, meaning what?

In most English usage there is no singular form, which makes it a plurale tantum.

Who first described coprolites in 1829, before which they were called 'fossil fir cones'?

The name combines the Greek kopros, 'dung', and lithos, 'stone'; they were also once known as bezoar stones.

Black Ivory, one of the world's priciest coffees, uses beans digested by which animal in Thailand?

Elephant dung is also turned into paper in Thailand, sold under brands such as Haathi Chaap.

Victorian leather tanners softened hides with 'bate', a mix of water and which animal's droppings?

Collectors of the stuff, known as 'pure', were called pure finders; its enzymes relaxed the hide's fibres before tanning.

Ancient Egyptians linked the dung-rolling scarab to Khepri, god of what?

They believed the beetle was male-only and self-created in a dung ball, mirroring Khepri creating himself from nothing.