This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind as we delve into the rich world of poop. This episode, the first of a two-part miniseries on poop, features a wide cast of characters all with some role in the production or management of poo, like our intestinal tract with its sphincters and microbiota, dung beetles that perform the duties so crucial for ecosystem function, and the sperm whale that produces a revered substance used in perfumes. We’re going behind the scenes to understand how the sausage really gets made (in a manner of speaking) and why we need a big perspective shift to stop seeing poop as waste and start seeing it as a resource. Correction: EW says that elephants poop 15 pounds a day, but in reality it’s more like 10x that - 150-200 pounds! Sorry for the mistake - we noticed it while listening through. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Janice Torres here. And I'm Austin Hankwitz. We host the podcast, Mind the Business, Small Business Success Stories, produced by Ruby Studio, in partnership with Intuit QuickBooks. We're back for season four to talk to some incredible small business owners. The big thing about working at tech is that it's ever evolving, ever changing. everyone's a rookie. That's how fast the industry is changing. So what I'm really excited about is to be part of that change. So listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, my story about poop is an embarrassing one. And one I am comfortable to share, but one that is embarrassing. And like a lot of embarrassing stories, it happened when I was much younger. I was in fifth grade at my first experience of staying away from my parents with my

school class. It was at an outdoor ed adventure in the woods where you do ropes courses and team building exercises and you stay in a cabin. I remember being excited for it. I remember having good friends in elementary school. And I remember the first day going rather well where we were in the woods playing outside. The first night was a large like sort of cafeteria style lunch where we had, I don't remember what the food was, but I sat with my friends. Everything was rather normal. And then we took a long walk to, there was a planetarium attached to this outdoor ed facility, and we were going to see a late night, probably like eight or nine o'clock, planetarium show. And I remember walking with my friends talking and my memory is a little fuzzy at this point,

possibly for reasons to protect myself, but at a certain point during this walk, I think I attempted to fart and poop came out. and then poop continued to come out. And at a certain point, I don't know what happened in my brain, but I was okay with continuing to let poop come out because there was really nothing I could do. I was committed to going to the planetarium. I was committed to seeing this through,

and I truly didn't know what else to do. And I'd already done the poop. And I thought it was done. So every time a new wave of having to go to the bathroom came to me, I let it happen. And I remember walking with a lot of poop in my pants. My pants were jeans. They were like tough denim jeans. And the poop was like, I would describe it as like toothpasteing down my leg.

It was really horrible. but again, I wasn't like super disturbed by it in the moment. We went to the planetarium. I sat next to my friends. I promise I think I continued pooping. I remember people smelling it. I remember successfully just saying it wasn't me and saying that I smelled it too. And then I remember walking back to our cabin immediately going to the shower,

taking off my pants in the shower, attempting to clean my pants so that I could put them, you know, in a bag that I could take home with myself. I remember that shower being possibly, at least up until that point, the greatest shower of my entire life. And that is the end of the story. I did put myself again the next day. I mean, it wasn't as obscene or abundant, but it happened again. And I don't know if it was nerves, if it was something about the diet, But that is my poop story, and I am not proud of it. I think my life would be very different had my friends found out. And most of them still don't know.

But anyway, that's my story. Thank you so much for being willing to share that. Hi, I'm Erin Welsh. And I'm Aaron Elman Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you. Welcome to poop. Poop. Poop.

Poop. Yeah. Part one. I think we decided to. to do an episode or two episodes about poop without really knowing what they were going to be about. And we're just like, poop, that sounds like something we would talk about. Like, it is. On, for on end, just like continue to talk about.

Yeah. Yeah. But we are going to. We eventually were like, okay, I guess we'll have to come up with topics specific to poop. What do people want to know about poop? And yeah. And so here we are now. So here we are.

So this episode, we're going to be talking about what is. in poop, how we make poop. And I'm going to go into a little bit of like poop in the animal kingdom. I'm so excited. And not just like how animals poop, but like all of the ways in which we can use poop. Yes. I'm excited. Yeah, poop is a resource is how I had originally titled this. The second episode was just like, poop is gross. Poop is gross. Yeah. So, and next week we're going to go into, yeah, more of poop is gross. And then what happens when you can't poop the way that you should poop. That's what I'll talk about.

Yeah. And I'll talk about like toilets, the history of sanitation, just how disgusting ancient Rome really was. I cannot tell you how excited I am to hear about how disgusting ancient Rome was. Well, I want to hear more about fiber and peristalsis. I'll tell you about it. I'm not going to tell you that much about parisdolsis. I just like the word there.

It's a great word. I just wanted to be able to say it. We'll say it multiple times. Oh, poop quarantini time. We have that actually. We do have that. I completely forgot. It's a while since we've like recorded, recorded. It's been a minute. What are we drinking this week? We're drinking. Drink number two. Drink number two. Of all the ways that you can say poop, we found that one to be the most charming. I really do, I really do like it. It's good. It's a good one. It's also a delicious drink. It is. What is in poop? Sorry, what is in drink number two, not poop number two. I'll tell you that later. But what's in drink number. two is basically a mint chocolate martini situation. So there's vodka, there's cremded

cacao or something similar to that. Chocolate liqueur. Peppermint schnapps. You can tell I don't make the drinks. Some chocolate syrup, you know, it's going to be delicious. All right. Done. We'll post that on social media at least. At least. Possibly website if we can get around to it. We're still working on that. Honestly, it's been a struggle. You know, it's fine. You just have to follow us on socials. Yes, please do. And then you'll see it there. And also on YouTube.

On YouTube, because we're here in the Exactly Right Studio. We are. It's really fun to be here again. And if you would like to experience some of that joy with us, please go to YouTube.com, the exactly right media channel. And you'll find us. And we're there. This whole season has been on YouTube. It has been.

So it's been quite exciting. With some occasional really fun videos. and pictures. We have a couple for you today. We do. All right. With some props. With some props.

Also, business, last piece, we swear, we're almost done here. Oh, website, yeah. We do have a website. Yeah, it's true. This Podcast. We kill you. We have a lot of things there. You can find all of the sources from this episode and all of our episodes.

You can find links to our bookshop. org affiliate account in our Goodreads list and merch. Merch. Oh, merch. You can also find transcripts. Transcripts. Yep. And BloodMobile.

all of our music. Yep. First-hand account form. First-hand account form. Contact us form. There's a lot there's lots. Check it out. Okay.

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available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. Sorry, every time I say the word poop, it makes me laugh still. I know, I know. Poop is the non-digestable parts of our food. Yes. Mixed up with a bunch of digestive juices, mucus, left off cells from our GI tract, and of course, tons of bacteria, both living and dead. What do you mean by tons? Oh, I'll tell you. Okay. Just you wait. So I thought that for the start of this episode and this series really where we're going to be talking so much about poop, it feels important and also fun for me to go through the process of digestion and learn how we make a poop together. How we make a poop together.

Learn together how we make a poop. Okay. I prefer that. Yes. Miss Frizzle did this on a lovely journey through Arthur's digestive tract. I still remember this. Same. So we're basically going to take Miss Frizzle's journey through our own digestive tract.

Great. Along this journey, we might mention a lot of places where things could go wrong. I'm not going to get super into detail on the things that could go wrong right now, but if you have questions, I know you'll ask them. I have no qualms about that. No. But mostly I'm going to be talking about the process of digestion, how we make a poop so that we know really what is in our poop. And the next week is when we'll talk more about how things can go wrong with digestion and poop. Poop problems.

Manufacturing. Poop manufacturing. LTD. So digestion starts in our mouth. As soon as we put a bite of food into our mouth. We've got amylases and other enzymes in our saliva that start the process. process of breaking down the complex starches that's in our food. And of course, our teeth are grinding and breaking things down into teeny tiny pieces. As we swallow, that food matter will pass

through our esophagus, aided by these muscular contractions that you love so much that we call peristaltosis, as well as aided by all of that saliva that we mixed our food up with. And then our esophagus has to travel all the way, like from our mouth, basically, down through a hole in our diaphragm, which is that muscle that separates our chest from our abdomen, through a hole in that diaphragm, and then through a sphincter called the lower esophageal sphincter. Sphinctor's are a recurring theme. Oh, yeah, they are. They are essential.

Exactly. Yeah. Very much so. And our food bolus, which is what it's called at this point, will land with a splash, I like to imagine, in the digestive acids of our stomach. Okay, so it's like a sea of acids. A little C. It's probably not realistically, but it's the way I like to imagine it. Okay. Okay. And our stomach is up in the upper left-hand side of our belly.

Got it. Okay. And there in our stomach, it will churn literally, with muscular contractions, and burn literally with hydrochloric acid, as well as other enzymes that our stomach makes like pepsin and other things to further break down our phyllis. food and create this kind of like liquidy mushy mass that's called chime. Chime. And our stomach then lets that chime out a little bit at a time through yet another sphincter called the pyloric sphincter. How little at a time?

What do you mean? It's a great question. So the amount of time, how little it kind of depends on what it is that you're eating. So liquids are going to. Like a donut that we just ate. It usually takes half of our food will be emptied from our. stomach in about an hour or so. Wow. Okay. And then the rest of it, it can really just depend on like how much fat was in it, how well we chewed it, because bigger pieces that are larger than like

two millimeters cannot pass through that sphincter. So they have to be broken down further before they can pass through. And all of that just happens in our stomach. So it's doing all of that. But usually between two and four hours, your stomach is completely empty after a meal. Two and four hours. And more fat means longer time digesting. Exactly. Yes. because it kind of sits on top because it floats. And so then it like whatever takes longer for it to kind of end up passing through that sphincter. Right. And in that way, our stomach is a really important regulator of our digestion, right?

Because it is slowly letting food or chime, rather, out of our stomach into our small intestine at a rate, ideally, that our small intestine can actually handle it. If it just dumped all of the contents at once, that would be miserable and you would feel really sick from it. because your small intestine, I feel like really doesn't get enough credit in our GI tract. It's so huge. It's huge. It's not aptly named. No. It is the long intestine.

It is the long intestine. It is small in diameter, and that's why it's called the small intestine. But yes, it is also the place where we are doing all, almost, of the absorption of our nutrients. Like you could take out someone's entire stomach. You could take out someone's entire colon. You really cannot take out their whole small intestine. But you can take out like chunks of it. Even taking out small chunks of it can have pretty significant effects and it ends up with

what we called short gut syndrome, which can have quite a lot of side effects. So anyways, I just feel like small intestine doesn't get enough cred. How long is the small intestine? Great question. Anywhere from, let me check my notes, because that's later, three to five meters, which is like 9 to 16 plus feet or so long. It's just all coiled up in there. Yeah. I want everyone to know that I tried really hard to make like a large diagram.

Did you make it to scale? Like you were going to have like nine to 15 feet. It was like the size of my child. Okay. Your child's not nine feet. No, no, no. Well, neither are we, but it was coiled. Yeah.

Oh, oh, I see. I thought you meant. No. Anyways. But I didn't. So I have no visuals right now except my hands. Okay. Where are we? Aaron, we've gotten way off course.

We started giving credit to the small intestine. So that's where all of our food that our stomach lets out makes it. And in addition to all of the absorption, which is happening in our small intestine, our small intestine is also a place of continued digestion. So our gallbladder, which everyone is an expert on now because we did an episode on gallbladder, as well as our pancreas, are both secreting additional digestive enzymes into our small intestine. They let them out in the first part of our small intestine. Okay.

And that, like, finalizes the process of digestion, essentially, for the most part. So things are digested. So things are all the way broken down because they have to be broken down all the way into, like, their singular components, right? All of our starches and carbohydrates from things like bread have to be broken down into single sugars. Our proteins have to be broken down into single amino acids. Fats have to be broken down into fatty acids so that in our small intestine they can be

absorbed through that intestinal wall and into our bloodstream so that we can actually use these things. So it's like digestion, extraction, excretion. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, except the colon does more than excretion. We'll get there in just one second. So yeah, so that's our small intestine and what it's doing the whole way down. There's like three different parts that have different names and each of them absorb different things. Don't ask me any specifics. Most all of everything is absorbed within the first two-thirds. So that's our duodenum and jujunum, the first parts of our small intestine. And then the last part is called the Ilium.

And there, even though most things have been absorbed by then, a few things are very important to be absorbed only in that spot, like B-12, as well as our bile salts. Throwback to our gall-batter episode. Interesting. Why? It's so specialized. Each part of our system has a purpose. And then at the end of this 16-ish feet journey, there's yet another sphincter, the Iliosecule valve.

Okay, I just have to say that all of my, all of my favorite words apparently are digestive words. Yeah, sphincter, peristaltis, duodenum. Yeah, not sphincter. It was the ilio-sicle. Oh, Ileosicle. I mean, sphincter's fine. I love sphincter. I would put it up there, but not like it's not, it's nowhere near duodenum. Okay.

It's a good word. Or jujunum, yeah. Yeah, these are good words. So at this iliosicle valves is what separates the small intestine from our large intestine, which is also called our colon. And our colon, it kind of is the star of the show when it comes to poop because this is where this mushy mass of chime and digested food bits that are left over turns into poop. This happens in our colon. Okay. Our colon starts down in the lower right quadrant of our abdomen.

It snakes up. That's called our ascending colon. Oh, yeah. Up towards our liver. It goes across the top of our belly and then it travels down to our lower left quadrant. And then it does a S curve. Okay, I liked that. Down and back to our rectum.

Okay. And then it exits our anus. Yet another sphincter. Two sphincters, in fact. Oh, what? Yes. The large intestine is called the large intestine because it's much wider than our small intestine. So it's like five to eight centimeters instead of two to four centimeters.

But it's not nearly as long. It's like five feetish, 150 centimeters or so long, a meter and a half. And the way that we go from this pure liquid chime that's rushing through the water side of our small intestine and into the formed tubes that we think of as turds. is because our colon is absorbing all of the water that is left over. Right. Our small intestine does a crap ton of water absorption as well. But our colon, that is the primary function of it. It's resorbing water and electrolytes, especially sodium, because the water follows the sodium.

And that is like its main job. It's absorbing like one to two liters of water per day. It also has a ton of musk. around it. And so it is doing peristolsus to really mix all of those contents to make sure that any other things that didn't get absorbed, things that need further breakdown by the microbes that live in our colon, which do a really important role in breaking down the last bits of things. And I'm assuming that our gut microbiome is very different from one start of the small intestine all the way to the end. The phew phew phew end. Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

every aspect of our GI tract has its own microflora. Love that. Yes. But yeah, and then at the end of that, at the very bottom of this gastrointestinal tract, the last pieces, the rectum and the anus are really, really important. Now, the anal canal, it's only a couple of inches long. Okay. Super short.

But it has in that two different sphincters. There's the internal sphincter and the external sphincter. Now, the internal anal sphincter is not really undervoluntary. control. So that's automatically opening and closing. And it does this. When your rectum starts to fill with poop, listen, we're going there. We're there. We're deep in it. As your rectum starts to fill with poop, this causes your internal anal sphincter to relax to let a little bit of the contents of that rectum into the anal canal. Okay. Okay. Then there's sensors there. There's like a system where it talks back to your brain through the sensory system in your anal canal that can tell, is it a poop or is it a fart?

But they can't, I mean, it can't always tell as we learn from our first hand account. But you sometimes can. And so then you go and have control over that external anal sphincter. Uh-huh. So that if it senses poop and you're in a place where you can let it out, then you relax that external anal sphincter. and let her rip. Yeah. You poop. Or you sense that there's poop and you're like, I'm not there yet.

And so you can clench that external anal sphincter, which everyone's probably doing right now as they listen. Or you can sense that it's a fart and you're like, now's the time. Now's the time. Release. Okay? And hope you're right. And hope that you're right about it. And that is how we make poop.

Amazing. Isn't it? I just really feel like that journey deserves credit. So there's more parasolic, the large intestine or the colon is the star when it comes to parastalysis. Everything is peristolsosing. Because you need it to be able for your food to even make it to your stomach to begin with. Your stomach has a lot of musculature and it's also contracting. But your colon just has like a different setup of muscles where they have these like transverse muscles that run along the whole colon as well as around.

Okay. So they just do a little different types of contract. to really form those turds. I really want to ask questions about, like, when does your stomach hurt? What is actually hurting? But I know that that's probably more next week. And it's so variable. But yes, we'll talk more about that next week.

When you have gurgles, where is that happening? Oh, do you mean Borberigmi? What? There's a word for that. And yet another really good word. I know. I know. It's really good.

Wow. Borberigmi is the tummy gurgs that you get. The gas bubbles. Okay. Why does it have a name? Because it's so good. So why? Such a good name.

Where does that come from? I have no clue. Is it a person? These are questions for you, Erin. I know. I literally, in one of the episodes, I have a whole thing on etymology. It might be. Is it this one?

I think it is this one. It is, yeah. Well, I don't have answers for those questions, but I do want to talk a little bit more about the poop that we have now formed. You asked at the beginning, like, how long does it take for us to just empty that stomach? And so that's, you know, again, anywhere from like one to four hours. But this whole process of forming a turd can take. take such a long time. It's anywhere from like 24 to 72 hours. We're talking like one to three days. Or if it's gum, it's five years.

That was way too big of a laugh for that. Sorry, but I thought it was quite funny. Yeah, no. Yeah, but it's hugely variable, which I think is so fascinating because it's not just that it varies person to person, which it does, but it can also vary depending on what you're eating. So fiber. I was just about to say. Which we'll talk more about next week. Okay. Fiber can significantly increase transit times, meaning that things move quicker through your colon and through your small intestine as well. Okay.

Increased transit times as in like faster. Faster. Faster move through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Less traffic. Okay. But anyway, the main time frame is like between one to three days. One to three days.

And what about other things that change transit time? Fiber is the biggest one that has been studied, but there's also, like, there's lots of medications that can slow down transit, big huge GLP ones that everyone is on right now, the like O-Zempics of the world. That's like one of their main mechanisms is slowing down gastric emptying. And so they slow your transit time. But lots of other medicines can too. Yeah. Why do like opioids slow down transit time? I think because of something about the receptors that they're working on where there's also opioid receptors in your GI tract. But yeah, they can cause pretty substantial constipation. The SSRIs also can affect your gut motility in general, not necessarily slowing it down, but sometimes, sometimes speeding it up, but just cause more, burying me, just more movement there because of how much serotonin we have in our guts. So there's a lot of different medicines that can do that. And there's also, in addition to a range in like how long it takes you to make your poop, which might affect how often you poop, there's also a huge range in consistency of poops. And for that we can talk about one of my favorite things in all of medicine to talk about, which is the Bristol Stool Scale or the Bristol Formed Stool Scale.

And I think we have an image of it, but you can Google it if you're just listening. It's called the Bristol Stool Chart. And this was invented in 1990. Yeah. Which feels like it should have been invented in 1910. Right, exactly. But it wasn't. It was within our lifetimes.

Yeah. And they actually invented this, or they came up with this really as a way to correlate stool transit time. Okay. So it was like the longer that your stool was taking to move through your guts, the harder your poops were going to be. Right. So a type one stool are described as separate hard lumps like nuts. So like you're popping out pellets. Rabbit pellets.

Oh, like these rabbit pellets. Like those rabbit pellets. Which I have a shout out to the San Diego. Natural History Museum for letting me borrow their poop. It's not real poop just in case anyone is concerned. But it's really accurate fake poop. So yeah, like hard rabbit pellets is like a type 1. And then a type 7 is just like pure liquid poop.

Just like completely watery, no pieces type of poop. And an ideal poop is considered usually between three and four and sometimes a type 5. So we want something. Is that just like depending on the person dependent? I see. Really. Like what is normal for you might be different. than what's normal for someone else.

That's interesting in and of itself. I know, right? And also this is a slightly different scale for kiddos who are very prone to constipation, but their scale is a little bit different just to make it easier for kids because they have a harder time describing their poop. Okay. Yeah. Why do kids have – is it just they're not eating fiber? What's up?

I think it's more that they hold their poop, especially in toddlers. Okay. They'll be like volitional stool holding, it's called. And so they basically are like either afraid to poop in the potty or it's like too big of change for them or they have one bad poop and now they're scared of it. There's like so many things I can go into it. So it's like typically during like the potty training stage. Potty training. But then once constip, we'll talk more about this next week. Okay. Sorry. But once constipation starts, it's really hard. Like it's a, it's a vicious cycle.

Oh. Yeah. It's a hard. It's a hard thing to break. Next week. I want to ask questions. I know. Next week. Okay. But that, I mean, that's like how we make poop. These are the ways that our poop can look. Yeah. Really varied. I don't know what other questions that you have about. poop. Fiber. Talk to me about fiber and yeah. No. Excuse me. What do you want to know? I'm going to talk more next week about fiber. Okay. Okay. What fiber does on like a general level is it holds on to water. It holds on to water. So fiber are parts of plant material that we cannot break down ourselves. Some parts of fiber, our gut bacteria can break down and they do so. And we do so. And

when they do, then they usually produce gas. And so that's why sometimes fiber can make you real bloated and gassy. Yep. Because your gut bacteria are so thrilled about it. But other times they don't really break it down. And then all it is is this basically like large structure that holds onto water. And so because your colon is mostly just absorbing water, the more fiber that you have, the less water that you're absorbing from that. Okay.

So the softer your stool stays. It also provides this like bulking agent, which then. your colon can peristols against, and that is why it moves along as well, too. Okay. So that's basically fiber. I do have a question, I was thinking. Okay. So you talked about that the poop is our undigested or, well, okay, the leftover foods.

Leftovers, yeah, yeah. Leftovers. And then it's also bacteria and some of our own gut microbes. Yeah. How much of it is gut microbes? What about our intestinal shedding? You know what, tell me about that stuff. I'm so glad that you asked. That's the last thing I wanted to tell you.

Oh my gosh. It's like we work so well together. So because that gets into like, okay, I said that it's just the leftover parts and now we know what our guts are doing the whole way down. But like what really is our poop made out of? What is it made of those? What is it really? Well, it's on the stool scale of something. 75% of our poop is just water.

75% on average. Okay. We're talking like a Bristol three to five. Sure. Okay. The less, the more constipated, the harder the stool, the less water it's going to have. But so 75% or so of it is usually water. And the remaining 25% is like biomass.

Up to 55% of that biomass is bacteria. Wow. And up to 50% of that bacteria are still alive of those bacteria. Sorry for my grammar. So we're talking like, I also didn't even mention this, but like in your colon especially, because that's where we think about our gut microbiome the most, because that's where we have the most abundant flora, even though we have microbes everywhere. Sure. We are talking hundreds of billions, if not trillions of individual bacteria from hundreds, if not thousands of different species, all of which are doing different things. They're serving different roles, including helping break down the final bits of food.

that weren't broken down by our digestive tract in our small intestine and our stomach, including making vitamin K and a number of B vitamins that are essential for us to then absorb in our colon. And playing a huge role in our immune system, protecting us from infection with other bacteria and then also just like modulating our immune response. And the more that we learn about our gut microbiome, the more like of a role that we know that it has in like our total body health. So when we're pooping out, like half of the actual mass of our poop is just bacteria. Yeah. Which is also. I can't get over that. And it's also why our poop is so gross because half of that bacteria is alive and could make you sick if it was the right type of bacteria or if it was opportunistic.

And I can't wait for you to tell us more about that. And then the rest of it is fiber, insoluble plant matter, undigested sugars, undigested protein, whatever other stuff. And then some cells and mucus. the rest of that 50% and the breakdown depends on what you're eating. But, Erin, unless you have any other questions, I'm going to transition to you. Okay. I mean, I just, okay, so there's so much bacteria. I just didn't, that's incredible. I know. Oh, I do have a question about just like water in general. So, you know, obviously we're drinking a lot of water. How does dehydration play a role in poop formation? Huge role, especially in.

in constipation. So like the biggest, one of the biggest risks with diarrhea is that your colon is not absorbing that water. And so you're at really high risk of dehydration because now you're losing one to two liters of water or more, depending on how much you're pooping. And so that's a huge risk of diarrhea. And so if you are dehydrated, your colon is still going to absorb 90% or more of the water that is left in your colon. But if you are dehydrated to begin with, then you're not drinking as much water. There's not as much water making it there. And so that's why you're at risk of constipation. Got it. Yep. My second episode is now also done. Just kidding. So I'm going to just end this by saying if we think back again to what our poop is made out of, right? Yes.

It's bacteria. It's plant matter. It's fats and proteins. If you go even more nitty-gritty on it, Our poop is hydrogen and oxygen. Sure. Water. Carbon, nitrogen, especially from the bacteria and undigested protein. And then there's some amount of inorganic matter that we haven't used or that came from these cells like iron and calcium and phosphate. There's salts. So really, Aaron, poop is just the building blocks of life. Duh.

So tell me about how animals use it. Oh, I can't wait. Great. I cannot wait. Okay. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant hand washing and harsh conditions.

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So I do care about the food I feed big and smalls. So go to just food for dogs.com for 50% off your first box, no code, no gimmicks, just real fresh food. We have so many names for poop. I know. So many names. There's excrement, which comes from the Latin to separate or sift out. Okay. Turd.

One of my fern. It comes from similar meanings, which I find interesting. to split, flay, torn off the body. Interesting. Crap originates from the word for residue, specifically from rendered fat. I love the word crap. I do too. I think turd is still, but like crap is more versatile.

Right. Like, ah, crap. Yeah, exactly. I can imagine my two-year-old saying it and it just cracks me up. There's feces, which is from the Latin for sediment or dregs. Stool, I don't need to take us on that enemological journey. It's longer. but it basically is like thrown as part of it, which I find fascinating.

Like a chair. Like toilet. Yeah. Oh, interesting. It's like, okay, fine. I'll take us on this journey. It started as seat for one person, as in like thrown. And then to the other stool that we think of today, you know, like the just a stool, like the little stool.

Yeah. To then privy to then poop. Huh. Yeah. Interesting. Dung. All manure. Poop.

Do you want to know where poop comes from? Yeah. It comes from the, okay. Does not come from poop deck, which I think is a common. Like swabbing the poop deck? Yep. Those are not the same? Not the same etymological origin, I think.

So poop probably comes from the middle English word poopin, popin, referring to the sound a horn makes, which then became fart. Fart. And then through Anamonopoeia became poop. Poopin. And then there are so many words that we use to describe animal poop. Droppings scat, which means any wild animal poop. Guano, bat, and bird poop. Have some of that?

Yep, bring out the guano. This is some bat guano. Again, thank you to the San Diego Natural History Museum. We've got some carnivore poop. Some carnivore poop. Look at that. It's so gross. It is, yep.

Yep, that's carnivore poop. There's frass, which is like insect waste. Insect poof. Sprint. Oh, I haven't heard that. Otter poop. specifically. I'm sorry I don't have an example of that. I just was like, wait. So then I was like, their own poop category. So I don't know. I tried to look up other species specific names for poop and I

couldn't really find very many. I didn't do a huge search. I mean, just cubic poop. That's all really. I know about that. I don't think that's, that's not like a name. That's not the name. But perhaps the most versatile word for poop is S-H-I-T. I know. I mean, we have a non-explicit rating. So we're not going to see the word. We're not going to say it. But like, I do love, so it shares a similar kind of etymological origin as excrement and turd. It comes from this idea of separation from the body, which also means it shares an origin with the word science. Really? Meaning to like separate one thing from another.

Huh. So. That's so interesting. Poop and science have the same. Well, not poop. Excrement and science have the same origin. Actually, S-H-I-T. But anyway.

But like, yeah, S-H-I-T has. so many different. We can attach that word to like shoot the bull, you know, chicken, whatever. I love it. I blank my pants. That kind of thing. But there is no shortage of the ways to refer to the gut-derived waste that we leave behind. But none of these words properly convey the respect and appreciation that poop truly deserves. It's true. Even the word waste, which is one of our more like, you know, polite words for poop, means something of no use, something you don't want, throw it out, something that you're like, I don't need this, get it away from me. Can that be said for poop? I mean, as a species, we have devised massive, intricate sewer systems, true feats of

engineering to increase the distance between us and poop. Feces, poop, elicits a feeling of disgust universally across all cultures, probably evolutionarily ingrained because of, because of avoidance of feces would also help to avoid disease. So, yes, not wanting to be around poop is reasonable. It's adaptive. But labeling it as waste really only tells one part of the story, poop as a problem to deal with. And that's the story that I'm going to tell more of next week. But this week, my goal is to shine a more appreciative light on this dark matter.

Dark matter is another good one. There's a book. I stole that from that. It's called The Other Dark Matter. But because without poop and especially the creatures that repurpose it, our planet would be a vastly different place. A lifeless, empty shell. So we have a lot to thank poop for. And this is, we had a parasite appreciation hour at one point. This is the poop appreciation hour. Oh, I love it. I'm here for it. Yes. Let's appreciate some poop. Let's appreciate it. Okay, here we go. When I started traveling to Panama to do field work for my PhD, I picked up the book Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miata. And by now, I've forgotten most of what I learned in that book. But there was one piece of advice that has stuck with me. If you want to see the forest come to life, watch what happens after you poop. In the woods. Okay, I'm reading a quote from this. Quote. After nature calls, do not beat a hasty, embarrassed retreat, but sit quietly nearby. The earliest contestants, arrive soon after you settle down. First are the tiny dung scarab beetles and metallic

otitted flies. The later arrivals are larger and behaviorally more complex scarab beetles. Upon landing, they embark on a series of maneuvers designed to secure a private cache of food that they will either eat themselves or barter for copulatory rights. While the scarabs are carting away dung, long, sleek, staphilinid beetles arrive on the scene. Agile and voracious, they burrow under the dung mass in search of their prey. Of all the dung deposited in tropical rainforest, human scat is the most avidly sought and the most quickly removed. More than 50 species of dung scarabs may converge on a pile of our manure before it is gone.

50 species? I don't even think I knew there were that many species of dung beetle. Oh, there are... Do I have it? We'll see. Lots. Lots. Many more than 50 species.

Isn't that great? Yeah. I love that. So anyway, that is a piece of advice that I will also say, do this, do this. Do poop in the woods. Do poop in the woods. Do poop in the woods, poop in the tropics, specifically? Like, does it have to be tropics?

No, there are poop. There are dung beetles on every continent except Antarctica. Wow. Yeah. They, I mean, they really are the unsung heroes of poop. I mean, in fact, all heroes of poop, including like the microbes and the fungi And they're just so cute. And they're so cute.

They're all unsung, right? Because no one really appreciates dung beetles. What they do for the environment. Yeah. Because without them, we would be buried in the stuff because they take our waste product and they use it themselves or they turn it into something that other organisms like plants can use. Case in point. Australia in the years following European colonization. Okay.

Dung beetles are globally distributed. Like I said, every continent except Antich. Antarctica, but they can be pretty picky about the poop that they utilize. When cattle were introduced to Australia by Europeans, the dung beetles there, which had evolved on a diet of marsupial poop primarily, were not interested in this new cattle dung. Oh, no. And the poop began to accumulate at a rate that approached 33 million tons per year. Oh, no.

Just mounds. It's like honestly so much poop that you can't imagine. I can't even visualize. 33 million tons. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about more other poop quantities that there's better visualizations, but this one I don't have a good one for. Huge. Huge, huge. Pest fly populations grew out of control and grazing land shrink because the cattle were like, I'm not going to graze near these towering piles of manure.

That's gross. Yeah. And after about 180 years of this, the government decided they just couldn't take it anymore. more. 190 years. I mean, that's like when the first cows were imported. Okay, but still. Yeah, the first fleet, yeah.

So between 1968 and 1982, in a move that I find shocking, considering the issues that introduced species have caused in the past, guess what Australia did? Introduce some dung beetles. They did. 55 different species of dung beetles primarily from southern Africa. Risky. Risky. Risky.

But it paid off? It paid off. Okay. About eight species took hold and since have been relatively successful in restoring some of the Australian pasture. That's so interesting. Have we ever done an episode that's like just focused on the introduced species issues? We haven't. It's very outside of our and yet inside of our personal interest.

We should do that. Let's do fire ants. Okay. Okay. All right. Done. Done. But these dung beetles, I mean, it just showed how.

integral they are in the poop cycle and what valuable work they perform. So for about 15% of the Earth's ice-free surface is used for agriculture. Okay. And that translates into a lot of livestock dung, much of which is handled by dung beetles and other decomposers. In 2006, that's like, it's 20 years ago, but you know, it's fine. Dung beetle contributions to the U.S. beef cattle industry alone were estimated at $380 million. per year. And no one's paying them. No one's paying them. They're getting paid in poop. They're getting paid in poop. And they're happy about that. They're thrilled. Yeah. By reintegrating dung into the landscape, dung beetles are helping to fertilize the soil, cycle nutrients, distribute seeds, both reduce and distribute parasites, which have a role in ecosystems as well. We still appreciate parasites. We love parasites. They control pest fly populations. Some are even pollinators. Really? Yeah, I don't know how, so don't ask me. I'm fine. For the past 40 million years, dung beetles have been bringing new meaning to the phrase,

one man's trash is another's treasure. Oh my God, I love it. Yeah. Over 5,000 species. There it is. I do have it. 5,000 species. 5,000 species.

I mean, it makes sense, though, because, like, think about niche differentiation. I know, but just of dung beetle. Dung beetles. Insects are so cool. I know. Okay. We are, oh, speaking of, if you are watching on YouTube, we have these sweet dung beetle shirts. Shout out to UC Davis and Tomology Department. And there are very other cute shirts that

we saw there too, but we just had to have these dog beetle shirts. Yes, we did. Thank you for selling them. Yes. But yeah, among dung beetles, there are rollers that transport balls of dung to later bury under the soil. There are tunnelers which bury the dung close to where it fell. There are dwellers which live in the poop or brood their young in the poop. And dung beetles are not innovators, right? Like they didn't inherit a planet that was piled high with poop. They are carrying on a tradition that is foundational to life as we know it, whereby, quote unquote, waste is in the eye of the beholder. For the earliest microbes, oxygen was thought was waste, right? It was a toxic byproduct. Carbon dioxide was king. And then came along the aerobic bacteria for whom oxygen

was not just like, wait, it wasn't just not waste, but it was essential. Essential. Oh, Erin, we're going deep time. I mean, that's like as deep as we're going to go. Still. Just a little bit of a dive and then back up. Love it. But what one organism produces as waste, another views as an opportunity. For us, we may view the poop that we produce as waste and nothing more.

Like, get this away from me. It stinks. It's gross. It's going to make me sick. But for dung beetles and flies and earthworms and soil microbes and fungi, our poop is a rich substance packed full of nutrients. It's a place to raise your young, to make your mark, and to do your part to reuse and recycle. I love imagining them, like, telling their kids this, like, okay, kids, you get ready. Carry on the family biz.

One kid is like, dad, can we just eat, like, broccoli instead of food? Can I pollinate? Yeah. But we really don't give these organisms, these king mituses of the world, enough credit for transforming our waste into a pile of gold. Yeah. That waist comes in all shapes and sizes from the cube-shaped poop of a wombat, which is something to do. It's just the way that it – Their colon.

Yeah. Paris dalsas. To the kidney-shaped dung of a horse. The pellets of rabbits. I did not know that horse poop is shaped like a kidney, like a bean. Bean-ish, yeah. Interesting. Beanie, yeah.

To the cylindrical tubes of carnivores. And us. And us. And omnivores. Yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't know if all omnivores have cylindrical poop. Listen, meaning there are generalizations that we can make and there are exceptions to everything. There's probably a Bristol stool scale for every animal. Just kidding.

Well, I was actually thinking that there probably should, right? Like, there would be. There would be. Because a sick rabbit probably wouldn't produce. My dog's poop ranges. Oh, God. In texture. And I'm like, how am I supposed to get this off of the grass? It is just embedded instantly. Especially the second or third poop of the walk. It's just like, ugh. You know when it's a third poop and you're just like, please don't. There's no way to do it.

Just there's nothing. Just be low grass at least so you can wipe it. On second thought, I'm glad we don't have more pictures for this episode. It's a good thing. But the variation in poop across the animal kingdom is so vast that you might wonder if there are any real common threads. And it turns out that there are. Okay. So by modeling how different species pooped, some researchers concluded that the animal.

concluded that the magic number for poop duration is 12 seconds. Yes. I found this paper, Erin, and I told my whole family about it. And now my kid counts every time he goes to the bathroom. He's like, one, two. And I'm like, it's been more than 12 seconds, bro. I've been counting my dog and I'm like seven. Are you okay?

Same. But it was 12 plus or minus seven seconds. That was the error bar. I mean, okay, that's still like quite a small range just in terms of, yeah. Because it was like from elephants to rabbits or something. Oh, yeah. Give it to me here. So, like, okay, elephants poop 15 pounds a day. Fifteen pounds?

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Which is 100 times more than a dog poops. Wow. Elephants poop at a rate of three inches per second. Keep going. Dogs poop at about a rate of 0.5 inches per second. Okay, so it's a much smaller volume.

It's a much smaller. But same rate. Same rate. And humans are like just under an inch a second. Although are humans actually pooping 12 seconds? Absolutely not. We'll talk more about that next week. But they're both like how. How is an elephant pooping 15 pounds and a dog poop? You know, like how are they all pooping? The poop from like the time that it exits the anus until the time it's done on the floor is 12 seconds plus or minus. Yeah. From an elephant to a dog. To a dog. A chihuahua even.

Yeah. How. How? The mucus. The mucus. It is the mucus that lines our intestines. It keeps everything moving along. getting out there smoothly. I just love this so much. I'm so glad that you also found the 12 seconds. Yes. That's all I have for like the commonalities though for poop. It's changed my life forever though. Me too.

Oh, we're going to talk more about it next week. The 12 seconds will come up again. 12 is the magic number. We should be able to poop in 12 seconds because we have cylindrical poops just like all of these mammals that they modeled. I mean fiber. Is that the bottom line? Paper was out of Georgia Tech. For a second I thought it was also out of Davis and I was going to give them another shout out.

But it was Georgia Tech. I don't know. I read it in a book. I did too, but then I found the paper because I was still, like, loved it so much. You were like, I need to know more. But yeah, as far as commonalities, like, that's all I've got. Fascinating. But the scent, the shape, the color, texture, and location of poop, they vary so much across the animal kingdom. And they can tell us about the animal that produced it and the kind of life that it is leading.

Okay. Right? So scent can tell us what the animal ate. Carnivore poop tends to smell much worse to us than herbivore. poop. Although scent is definitely, again, in the nose of the beholder, right? Like, as anyone who has had a dog can attest, watching as their dog rolls in something unspeakably foul. So disgusting. I'm just like, why? Yeah. Why? I still don't know why. There's, there are a lot of reasons why, actually. Sent is a really powerful method of communication. So, for instance, it can alert a

predator to prey species nearby. This is one reason why your dog might be rolling in poop just to be like, I'm not a prey. It's not me. I'm not here. Yeah. Or like, I am. I, I'm, you know, mighty predator, smell my body. Smell my scent. It is my own feces, yeah. Okay. So it might be like a disguising of scent. Sharks apparently can recognize the poop of seals and humans and have may use it as a

cue to like, oh, there's prey nearby certain sharks. Wow. Yeah. I feel like you hear so much about how much sharks can scent blood, you know, like they can sense blood, but I never thought about them using poop as a, that makes sense because it would just be floating in the... Right. Interesting.

And also, poop would tell you more about the individual animal than blood. Than just blood. Yeah. Right. Blood is just blood. I mean, I'm sure blood is also a cube, but like poop apparently too. Juicy, juicy seal. Yep.

Up ahead to the right. Take a left at the buoy. I don't know. Some species bury their poop. Or they shoot their poop in a projectile manner. to throw predators off the trail. Butterflies do this called frash shooting. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. Okay. The smell of poop can also signal to other members of your species like, hey, this is mine. This is my territory. Pause off. Yeah. I feel like big cats do that. Hippo.

Yeah. And also hippos do this. Hipos? Yeah. Okay. Their tails will be like helicopters and they're like pooh-poo-poo-foo-foo. And it just shoots out. Getting their poop all over their little spot?

Mm-hmm. Some species have specialized glands that leave. concentrated sense, like dogs. They might even have other species have communal latrines where they all go poop. It's kind of like a very stinky message board. Like, hey, what's everyone up to who's down to like party this weekend? Did they hang out there? I don't think they hang out there.

I can just poop and walk away. Yeah. Certain infections might make poop have a distinctive smell like C-DIF. Kind of warns like, hey, this is I'm not good. I'm on well. Don't roll in this. And for those species that have a keen sense of smell, poop is a rich source of information.

And we humans have harnessed that power for our own data gathering. What? Oh, yeah. Tell me. So there are several researchers that have trained dogs to search for and alert to the poops of certain species to help with, like, estimating biodiversity or where animals are distributed in a region, things like territory size, habitat preference, diet composition, and so on. It's hard for us to find poop in a landscape. But a dog is like, whew. They know exactly where it is.

Yeah. You just got to train them to not roll in. So then they use the dogs to find the poop and then they examine the poop. They'll look at the poop. Oh, fascinating. That's so cool. There are even whale poop sniffing dogs. Whale poop? Whale poop? Oh, yeah. Whale poop is, I cut a huge, there was like a quote about the different like colors and shapes that whale poop can come in. I've never thought about whale poop. Oh, yeah. Do the, do the dogs sniff the whale poop on the, like when it washes up on the shore? I think they go on boats. They go on boats and they can sniff it from the water? I think because it's pretty diffuse. Like it'll just... What?

Yeah. And like a plume. Oh my God. I love this so much. And so there are some dogs that will like, I think it's orcas specifically, they'll like track individual whales to be like, okay, let's now test the water or test the poop and like let's check their health. Oh my God.

I know. That's so cool. I know. I know. And so we may not be able to smell as well as our canine companions. but once we get our hands on some poop, there is really like no end to what we can tell. So, Aaron, you took us through the Bristol stool scale, but that's just one species. Consider the variation that you might find if you are tracking a bear, a black bear, throughout the course of a year, right?

Like, where does that bear live on the east, you know, in the east, on the west, north or south? How does that influence its diet? Is it a cicada year? Is it living in a more urban environment and digging in trash? Or is it just like total wilderness? Is it eating huckleberries or blackberries, fish or squirrels? You know, like there's, is it an older bear or a baby bear? There are there parasites?

Is it stressed? I mean, poop is an informational pile of gold. Yeah. Even if we don't know whose poop we've just stumbled upon on a hike in the woods, we can usually make some guesses based on its shape or its size. Carnivores tend to poop less than herbivores. Their scat often will contain like hair or bones. And so if you see that, you're like, oh, carnivores. Yep. There's a little coyote poop. Yep. And it comes in a more cylindrical shape. Erbivores, on the other hand, poop way more. And their poop tends to be floatier with plant material. So that's carnivore. If you're tuning in on YouTube, we have some samples. Some herbivore poop. So that's like mountain lion and rabbit right there. And yeah, so like the herbivore poop, it's like floatier poop. There's plant material. And it could vary from like sheep.

pellets to cow pies and so on. And it depends in part on how much moisture an animal retains. Of course. As we know. So for example, we think of these rabbit pellets as little hard balls, but rabbits also produce another type of poop that is softer and more nutrient dense. And we don't really see this type of poop because they produce it in their dens and they typically eat it straight away right from the source often. They eat it themselves? They eat it themselves. I mean, a lot of animals will eat their baby's poop too. And that's for a number of reasons. Part, it's like re-extraction of nutrients. And it's not just rabbits. It's a lot. Mice, cows, termites. Sometimes, again, it's like nutrient reabsorption. Cows will tell you in a second. It could be to conceal the

poop of their offspring from predators. Or some researchers, especially when it comes to cows, think it might be a strategy to refresh the gut microbiota during a bout of intestinal disease. Oh, that's so interesting. So like when cows, are really showing like not good poop. They'll sometimes eat it to be like, do I need to get something like that. That's so interesting. Like, why would you want to eat the poop? You would think, like, let me eat my friend's poop.

Right. Yeah. If my friend's not pooping bad and I'm pooping bad, I'll eat my friend's poop. Yeah, let's find the best cow pie here and make a little meal. They eat their own poop. I think they eat their own. Yeah. Gross.

And before we turn up our noses at this, it's probably too late. Some of the most expensive coffee in the world is made from being. that have passed through the bowels of a palm civet. You heard of us? Civet poop coffee? Yeah. Copee Luwak, it's the civet coffee. It's not the only prized poo product.

Okay. There's also Ambergris. Ambergris, what is that? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I am so glad you asked. I was going to tell you anyway, but... Well, tell me now. Thank you for asking.

For over a thousand years, ambergris has been one of the most valuable and sought-after natural substances. What is it? It is a hardened mass of fecal material and undigested squid beaks that forms in the intestines and rectum of about 5% of sperm whales. Sorry. Yeah. Let me know if you need me to reread that. Can you just so that I can really visualize? Sure. Okay. Hardened mass of fecal material and undigested squid beaks. Because they're just chunks of, yeah, that forms in the intestines and rectum of about 5% of sperm whales. 5%. So it's basically constipated sperm whale rectal mass.

Exactly. And people eat this or? Oh, they do all kinds of things with it. Okay, so the reason that it like forms into a hard mass, so of course sperm whales eat squids, they can't digest their beaks. And so usually they'll vomit the beaks up. That is your strategy because whale poop is liquid. and if some get through all the way, it just gets stuck.

It's like a bzor. Exactly. And so because the poop can't, like the rectum can't relax enough to let the poop or to let the squid beaks through. And so then it just sort of forms and forms into these beaks will mold together, form into this big mass. It's like a hardened ball of huge chunk of hardened whale poop and squid beaks. And what happens, there's kind of two different schools with thought. One is that finally the rectum relaxes enough to let it out. The person whose book I read was like, I don't think that happens. I think that it burst and the whale dies. The whale dies. Yeah. So people aren't killing sperm whales to get this? I mean, I know they killed them for lots of things. There was, they would have. And they probably did for a while. So for a long time, this was called floating gold because people were just finding it on the surfaces of the ocean. And they were like, this smells amazing. This is like. we could use this for everything.

How could it possibly smell me? Oh, I mean, yeah. And so, but then it was when whaling kind of picked up in the 1700s, 1800s that people finally were like, they would kill a whale and be like, oh, my God, it's ambergris. Can you believe it? So that's where they figured out where it came from. Yeah. So that's the most finally it was like, doing different theories like, oh, I think it's, what I can't remember some of the other theories. Okay.

They used it for medicine. a condiment, an aphrodisiac, and it is still today incorporated as a fixative and a musky scent in perfumes. Fixative, meaning like it makes the smell, like the scent stay stronger. So it's still used today. And it is, I mean, floating gold. So there was a chunk of Annenberg was found in 1914 that weighed 455 kilograms. Oh, big. Massive, massive. And it sold then in 1914 for 23,000 pounds, which in today's money is 3.4 million pounds or $4.5 million. So that... It's more than gold. It's more than gold. Actually, I don't know if that is. It's probably not gold. It's definitely not gold. Yeah. It's wild. But okay, this is, I am fascinating.

I love this. If we, like, checked on the back of like a perfume bottle and if it says amber griss on it, that means it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, Concipated sperm will. I mean, I've never looked at a back of a perfume bottle and saw a list of ingredients, but I think you would probably be able to find perfumes that contain ambergris. Fascinating. Do you want to know what it smells like? Yes. Okay. According to a new scientist article, it has a rich and complex odor consisting of, quote, fine tobacco, the wood of old churches, the smell of the tide, sandalwood, fresh earth, and seaweed in the sun. I believe seaweed. I love to be fresh-eyed. Because let me tell you, I've smelled a lot of squid in my life. I want it to be fine tobacco in the wood of old churches specifically. Old churches. That's quite specific. Right.

What about an old church? I don't know. There's some. How old? I don't have any answers. I don't either. I have no answers. I mean, I'm left totally baffled still.

Okay. Ambergris and Kopi Luwock, done. They may be treasured as poop and novelties. Are you ready to move on from Amber Gris? I'm going to think about it forever. Good. 12 seconds in ambergris. But these two, they're not the only way that poop can be used.

Poop can be used as fuel, as insulation, as insect repellent, as fertilizer, as building material, as paper. One elephant can produce enough dung in one day to make 115 sheets of paper. How do you make paper from poop? Fiber from the undigested plant material. Are people doing that? Can I buy elephant poop paper? Google it. Okay.

Yeah. Well, you know. We will after this. We'll make some. Yeah. We can DNA test it to determine the diet of an animal or catch a criminal. Oh. This was done by matching DNA of dog feces at the scene of a crime to dog poop on the suspect's shoe.

Oh, fascinating. Isn't that wild? Yeah. I mean, talking about like thinking outside the box. It was coming from that dog. It was that same pile of poop. Yep. On a shoe.

Because they saw, like, I think in the crime scene photos. there was like a smear, like the dog poop smear. And then someone had it. Yeah, that's why you got to clean your shoes. I mean, or just like not, you know, murder people. But yeah. You choose. Both and.

But poop is so crucial ecologically in seed dispersal and parasite transmission. But the most important role of poop is in nutrient redistribution. Critters like dung beetles that move and bury poop. soil microbes that transform it into plant food, animals like hippos and otters that live in water and on land, and they move nutrients across those boundaries. Oh, interesting. Whales that feed at lower depth and then rise to poop and breathe. They redistribute nutrients across that depth. Fish poop and whale poop that helps to offset ocean acidification. Like all of these are critical players in the poop nutrient cycle. But we humans are making it harder for them to do their work.

As a planet, we are producing more poop than we have ever before produced. Is that just because we're more people? And more animals. Livestock? More livestock, yeah. And it's not even across the landscape. History has never seen the likes of the factory farming that exist throughout the world today. Okay, I'm going to give you some numbers.

So in 1961, there were approximately 400 million pigs, 940 million cows, Around the world. Around the world. Okay. 1.3 billion sheep and goats and 3.9 billion chickens. Okay. Just over 60 years later in 2023, which is the most recent data I could find, we are at 1 billion pigs, which is more than double. 1.6 billion cattle up from 940 million.

2.2 billion sheep and goats. And from 3.9 billion chickens in 1961, we're at 29 billion. chickens. And we wonder why bird flu? Do we wonder why bird flu? We know exactly why bird flu. Oh my God. And humans have more than doubled over that time from 3 billion to 8 billion. But all of those numbers were like more than double for the amount of humans. Yes. Wow. Each of us humans poops about 1% of our body weight a day. So one of our entire selves every few months. Wow, we poop our weight every few months. Each year, domestic animals produce about 8 trillion pounds of poop, which is 10,000 Empire State buildings or 700 Great Pyramids of Giza.

You cannot. I can't. I cannot. That's the best visualization because we can even still, how do we envision how do we envision that? I can envision the single Empire State. I know. 10,000 of them. 10,000 of them. That's how much poop. That's more than New York City worth of poop. Oh, my gosh, yeah. Oh, I think, oh, next episode, I have a New York City poop statistic. But that excess poop, that incredible amount of poop that we are pooping now, it doesn't translate into more dung beetles and more nutrient-dense soils. Like I mentioned at the top, dung beetles can be picky about the poo they use,

but even those that like cattle poop are under threat because of the pesticides that livestock are treated with, like ivermectin, which is then, like, excreted in their poop and is toxic. to dung beetles. And so there are like dung beetle, they're like threatened dung beetles or like deforestation can also reduce dung beetle population because they rely on other things to you. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm singling out dung beetles because they're really charismatic. You know, our shirts like, you know, who else would want poop on a shirt? But this ripples far beyond dung beetle populations. Like we are facing a global poop catastrophe. Too much of it. And in all the wrong places. Pootastrophe. Poo-tastrophe. Caca-tastrophe. No. Actually, I like that.

Did you say caca-tastrophe? Yeah. A cacatastrophe. That's really funny. Thank you. Wow. But, you know, in the past when poop has come up on this podcast, it's mostly been in the context of, like, public health, right? Like that wrong place has been in our water or our food supplies. But that's just one component. What about our farm runoff, our waterways, our pasture lands leached of nutrients and the poop just going down the river, right? And so I wanted to use these two episodes to approach poop from a different perspective than the typical public health one that we usually go with. It's one where we suspend our disgust and we consider what poop represents not as a waste, but as a hugely valuable substance. And hopefully today I have left you with a little bit more appreciation for crap or at least some. fun facts to share. 12 seconds, Ambergris. And next week, I'll go into how we attempted to solve

our poop problem over the centuries and what the future of waste management might hold. And that's all I've got for you today on poop. I love it. Except for sources. Erin, that was so much fun. I'm glad. I had great. I know. Well, that's good because we have another episode next week. Perfect. Yay. Oh, wow. That was really good. We should tell everyone where they could beat more. There is So much. I mean, narrowing down the narrative for poop was ridiculous. Yeah. And so there is so much more out there that you can read. Let me tell you a few examples. So a couple of books. One by Joe Roman called Eat Poop Dye, How Animals Make Our World. Eat Poop Die. I mean, what else do you do? And then another one. This is, I think, my favorite title of a book that I've come across lately. So it's by David Waltner Toes, The Origin of Feces. The Origin of Feces. The origin of feces.

That's so good. It's good. And then there's a paper by Robert Clark, the origin of ambergris, and then by Nichols et al from 2008 ecological functions and ecosystem services provided by Scarabina Day, Dung Beetles. I love it. And more on the website. Yeah. My sources are not as much fun because I mostly used a textbook that was incredibly boring. But shout out to the people who wrote it because it was quite useful.

It was called the digestive system from basic sciences to clinical practice. I didn't read the whole thing. It was like 400 plus pages, but it's quite useful. So especially if you want more about poop. I also have a few different papers here. There's the characterization of feces and urine, a review of the literature to inform advanced treatment technology. I actually really loved that. It was a paper from 2015 in Critical Reviews and Environmental Science and Technology by Rose et al.

And then there was a paper that I – or a book that I only read part of. Okay. But I really enjoyed the parts that I read. So I'm going to give it a shout out. It was called Flush, The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure. Did you read that book? No. It was interesting.

Wow. I looked up so many poop books. I don't know how I came across this book. I love that. I enjoyed the parts that I read. But there's a whole bunch more. Yeah, there's literally so many more. We'll post them all on our website, this podcast, mokkill.com.

We will. We will. Thank you again to the provider of our first-hand account. It's, thank you. I can't express enough. Thank you. So much for sharing that story with us. I will cry laughing, thinking about it once again. Oh, yes. Me too. Thank you also to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.

Thank you to everyone at exactly right, Ben and Ray. Everyone, including everyone here today and Tom and Leanna and Brent and Pete and everybody who's involved in making this possible. It's amazing. And thank you to you listeners for listening and watching. Yeah. However you partake in this podcast, we appreciate you. Appreciate it. Please subscribe to the exactly right YouTube channel or us on the podcatchers that you like. Yeah. We don't say that enough. We don't say that enough. But it helps us. So thank you for doing it. We just say that a lot. You're right. We do. And thank you also to our fantastic patrons. We really appreciate your support. You mean the world. Truly, truly. Thank you. Yeah. Until next time, wash your hands. You filthy animals. This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel. Listen, I have a bone to pick with these dog food brands calling themselves fresh, natural.

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