48 Fun Facts About Poop

About three-quarters of fresh human faeces is made of what?

Water: fresh stool is about 75% water, and the longer it sits in the colon, the more of that water the body draws back out, which is why a stool that lingers comes out hard and dry.

What gives faeces its usual brown colour?

Bile pigments from the liver: bilirubin, a leftover of worn-out red blood cells that the liver sends out in bile, is converted in the gut into the brown compound stercobilin.

What is the medical chart that sorts human faeces into seven types by shape called?

The Bristol stool scale was devised at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in 1997, and it works because the shape tracks how long the waste has spent in the colon.

On the seven-type stool chart doctors use, types 1 and 2 point to what?

Constipation: types 1 and 2 are hard lumps that have sat longest in the colon, while types 6 and 7, at the other end of the chart, are diarrhoea.

Doctors' stool chart calls the ideal type 'like a sausage or' which animal?

Snake: the chart's wording for type 4 is 'like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft', and types 3 and 4 count as ideal because they pass easily without excess liquid.

What is a newborn baby's first stool called?

Meconium is sticky like tar and almost odourless, because it is made of what the baby swallowed in the womb, such as amniotic fluid, mucus and shed cells, and not of digested milk.

Skatole, the compound chiefly behind the smell of faeces, smells like which flower once heavily diluted?

Jasmine: skatole occurs naturally in jasmine and orange blossom, so perfumers add traces of it to floral scents, and it is even approved as a food flavouring.

Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?

The wombat: the team that won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize found the corners form in the last stretch of its intestine, where stiff and stretchy bands of the gut wall alternate.

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

They stack and don't roll: the animal arranges its droppings in the open to mark its territory and attract mates, so a shape that stays where it is put is an advantage.

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

About once a week: the sloth climbs down, digs a hole and covers it over, a slow trip to the ground that leaves it open to predators and that biologists still argue about.

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

The Asian palm civet: it eats ripe coffee cherries and passes the beans whole, and rising demand has since led producers to keep civets in battery cages and force-feed them.

Kopi luwak originated in the coffee plantations of which country?

Indonesia: on Java's Dutch colonial plantations in the 19th century, farmers began brewing the beans they gathered from animal droppings, and Indonesian islands still produce most of it.

A male Onthophagus taurus dung beetle can pull 1,141 times its weight, like a person lifting six full what?

Double-decker buses: the beetle's strength is for fighting, not hauling dung, as rival males lock horns underground and try to shove each other out of a female's burrow.

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?

Australia: its native beetles had evolved on the dry pellets of kangaroos and left wet cattle pats to smother pasture and breed flies, so scientists shipped in species from Africa and Europe.

Much of the white sand on tropical beaches, such as Hawaii's, is the excrement of which fish?

Parrotfish: they scrape algae off dead coral with beak-like teeth, grind up the rock they swallow, and pass it as fine sand, in big species hundreds of pounds a year.

Ecologists sort dung beetles by habit into rollers, tunnellers and which third group?

Dwellers: they neither roll dung away nor bury it, and simply live inside the pat; among rollers, it is usually the male that pushes the ball while the female rides or follows.

What is the scientific term for fossilised faeces?

Coprolite: the name joins the Greek for dung and stone, and such fossils are prized because they hold direct evidence of what extinct animals ate.

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

Mary Anning noticed as early as 1824 that the odd stones lying inside her Lyme Regis ichthyosaurs held fish bones and scales when broken open, the clue that they had once been meals.

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

York: it lay beneath the future site of a Lloyds Bank branch, in the Viking town of Jórvík, and its hundreds of parasite eggs show that its maker was riddled with worms.

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

It was dropped and broke: the specimen snapped into three pieces while being shown to visitors and had to be pieced back together, years after an expert called it as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels.

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

Seabirds and bats: their droppings are so rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium that 19th-century farmers paid to have them shipped across oceans.

Which Pacific atoll did a sea captain claim for the United States in 1859 under the Guano Islands Act?

Midway: the Act let any American who found guano on an unclaimed island take it for the United States, yet nobody is recorded as ever mining guano on Midway.

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

Peru: the islands were so valuable that Spain seized them in 1864, starting a war, and by the end of that decade their richest deposits were close to worked out.

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

Collapsed demand for it: the process makes fertiliser from the nitrogen in air, so farmers no longer needed droppings dug from distant islands and shipped across oceans.

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

Cecotropes are made in the cecum, where microbes ferment fibre into vitamins and amino acids, and the rabbit eats them as they emerge so those nutrients get a second trip through the gut.

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

The sperm whale: ambergris is thought to form in its gut around the sharp beaks of the squid it eats, and though fresh lumps smell faecal, years at sea turn the scent sweet.

Whale faeces help fight climate change by fertilising what?

Phytoplankton: whales feed in the depths and release their plumes at the surface, and the iron and nitrogen in them feed blooms of these tiny plants, which take up carbon dioxide.

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

Gong farmers could work only at night and had to cart the waste beyond the town boundary, but the pay was good: sixpence a day at Hampton Court under Elizabeth I.

Which crisis of the hot summer of 1858 pushed Parliament to pay for London's modern sewers?

The Great Stink: The Times said Parliament was 'all but compelled to legislate' by sheer stench, and Joseph Bazalgette's sewers went on to end the city's cholera outbreaks.

'Night soil' is a historical euphemism for what?

Human excrement: the name comes from the hours it was collected, since privies could be emptied only after dark, and the loads were often sold on to farmers as fertiliser.

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

Organic matter: it feeds the microbes and fungi that make soil fertile, which is why a cover crop ploughed back into a field also counts as a manure though no dung is involved.

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

China: an Arab traveller in 851 noted with surprise that the Chinese wiped with paper instead of washing, and in the 14th century one province alone made ten million packets a year.

America's first commercial toilet paper, sold by Joseph Gayetty from 1857, was marketed as a remedy for what?

Piles: Gayetty's Medicated Paper, treated with aloe and watermarked with his name on every sheet, was sold as a haemorrhoid cure, and at least one medical society attacked him as a quack.

Seth Wheeler's 1883 patent gave toilet paper which now-familiar form?

A perforated roll: Wheeler patented holders for it too, and most of his drawings show the paper hanging over the front, which one side of the over-or-under argument still cites.

Faecal transplants, roughly 85 to 90% effective, are mainly used against recurring gut infections of which bacterium?

C. difficile: the infection takes hold when antibiotics clear out the gut's normal microbes, and a healthy donor's stool puts them back, often after repeated drug courses have failed.

Which African animal spins its tail like a propeller as it defecates, flinging dung over a wide area?

The hippopotamus: the habit is called muck-spreading and happens in rivers as well as on land; it was long said to mark a male's territory, though some zoologists now doubt that.

Everyone Poops, the 1977 picture book, was first published in which country?

Japan: Tarō Gomi's Minna Unchi reached American shops only in 1993, sixteen years after it came out at home, and became the best-known title of its small American publisher.

Fossilised dung belongs to which class of fossils?

Trace fossils: like footprints and burrows, fossil dung records what an animal did, in this case what it ate, and not the shape of its body.

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

Sanitation: toilets, sewers and treatment keep human waste out of drinking supplies and food, which is how diseases such as cholera and typhoid are stopped from passing from one gut to the next.

What colour is stool likely to turn when food rushes through the gut too fast for digestion to finish?

Green: the gut's contents are that colour early in their journey and turn brown only on the slow trip through the bowel, so when everything is rushed, as in diarrhoea, they arrive unchanged.

Brown stains of droppings on sea ice, seen by satellite, revealed unknown colonies of which penguin?

Emperor: these penguins breed on sea ice in places too remote and cold to survey from the ground, so scientists look for the stains instead, and a 2020 sweep of the coast took the known colonies to 61.

Thomas Crapper, wrongly credited with inventing the flush toilet, in fact made his living as what?

A plumber: Crapper's London firm sold and improved toilets and opened the first bathroom showroom, but he held no patent for the flush itself, and the slang verb was in print in 1846, when he was a child.

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

Dregs: Latin faex was the sediment left at the bottom of a wine cask, and English used the word that way for two centuries before it came to mean excrement in the 1630s.

Which Oxford geologist showed in 1829 that the odd stones found inside fossil sea reptiles were ancient dung?

William Buckland was so taken with fossil dung that he had a table top inlaid with polished pieces of it, and he claimed to have eaten his way through the animal kingdom.

A Thai coffee, among the world's priciest, is made from beans that have passed through which animal?

Elephants: the coffee, sold as Black Ivory, uses beans that keepers recover from the dung, and the long fermentation in the animal's gut is credited with a smoother, less bitter cup.

Victorian 'pure finders' scoured the streets for which animal's droppings to sell to leather tanners?

Dogs: tanners worked the dung, known in the trade as pure, into hides to soften them, and Henry Mayhew recorded the London poor who made a living by gathering it.

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

The rising sun: a beetle pushing its ball of dung looked like the god rolling the sun across the sky, and the young beetles that crawled out of buried balls seemed, like each dawn, to be born from nothing.