Animals That Eat Poop

Thanksgiving is a time during which many Americans eat things they shouldn’t -- so it’s a perfect time to discuss coprophagia in the animal kingdom. But, unlike many holiday dinners, these examples of poop-eating organisms are not exercises in dysfunction. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick invite you to join yet another feast of knowledge. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Joe McCormick and Robert. I have just been out on
vacation for a bit and I came back to find you, uh,

(00:23):
absolutely rare and to go about coprophagia. That's right. Uh.
The consumption of poopy, which I figured is is ideal.
You should be listening to this episode during the week
of American Thanksgiving. It's a time when people eat too much,
and they eat a lot of gray and brownish foods
that are too rich. They probably shouldn't be eating all

(00:45):
of this stuff, but they do anyway. So it's a
perfect time to talk about poop eating. Cram down the
gullet with loving care, uh, in the presence of one's
family and and in laws and all that. Now, before
anybody turns us off, I do want to drive home
that most of what we're gonna be talking about in
this episode, UH relates to animals eating poop. As the

(01:06):
title of the episode implies. At the very end, when
when everyone's ready, we may talk a little bit about humans,
but first we will deal with animals before we deal
with the added complexities of human beings. Now, I'm sure
the listeners out there are wondering the same thing I was.
So I got back from vacation to find you super
excited about animals eating poop, and I was like, well,

(01:30):
what got you going on this, Robert? Why did you
fling yourself headlong into a pit of coprophagia for the
week of Thanksgiving? Well? I originally had the idea to
do it after watching a David Attenborough narrated special titled
Spy in the Pod, which is fun. It's a fun
little show in which they have a remote control robot
it's hanging out with elephants, and they briefly cover coprophagia

(01:55):
practiced by elephant calves, which we'll get to in this episode.
And I thought, well, that's interesting that a new spin
on something that I'd largely just dismissed as being essentially
an act of both of human defilement but also abnormal
animal behavior. And I thought, well, this sounds like kind
of a grim top kip topic, but certainly thanksgiving us

(02:16):
the time to do it. Um. I think we've talked
about what like poisonous foods and stuff like that. Yeah,
it kind of fits in with what we've done and
were those aren't we Yeah, yeah, it's just running at
least two and three Saturday. Yeah, but but anyway, anyway,
and looking into the topic, then I realized, oh, this
is a fascinating topic. And in the grand tradition of
our episodes on cannibalism, h b clity, and necrophilia, I

(02:41):
think that there's a there's an awesome challenge in tackling
something like this, something that is generally considered very abnormal
behavior for humans, and looking at it from just the
the boiled down, no nonsense, uh animal side of things,
like what is it? How does it make sense within
the realm of animal biology and behavior, and then how

(03:03):
might what might we apply that to the human scenario
even Yeah, the sort of like brute chemical energy realities
and and uh microbiological ecology of the world. In in
that kind of context, poop eating begins to come into
focus as a beautiful thing. Yeah, you know, as I

(03:24):
discussed in our our Halloween two thousand and eighteen episode
Horror Anthology, Volume one, UM, there's an episode of Night
Gallery in which a character is tricked into believing himself
cursed to an irreversible transformation into a human earthwork, and
it's Leslie Nielsen with an iPad like shooting at walls. Yeah,
the a man with no fear who has eventually overcome

(03:45):
with fear of becoming a worm. And I said that
one of the reasons we find this concept so horrifying
is that it reduces us to our alimentary track. We
fear the worm at the heart of our being, and
I think that we see that reflected in this episode
as well, in thing that kind of reduces us to
just our digestive system tends to have an inn aid

(04:06):
horror to us because we're definitely going to be touching
on the microbiome and all of this the importance of
gut bacteria, which continuing research tells us just is far
more important than than we ever imagined in the past.
I mean, the worm dictates much of our health and
even our mind. Yeah. We might get into this more
as the episode goes on, but it is so fascinating

(04:27):
that we have, uh, such a such a deep disgust
and revulsion for the products of the human digestive system. Yeah,
And it is just it's I mean, a certain amount
of it is is learned for sure. But I think
part of it too is that we're just we're not
a coprophegic species, so we do not engage in this
uh routinely or is a part of of normal behavior.

(04:48):
I mean really, in the grand scheme of things, we're
weird for not doing it. While we tend to look
at it the other way. We we if we see
an animal consuming its own poop or the poop of
another creature, we think all of that is grotesque, how
inhuman of this non human creature. Well, just think about
the sensory difference, Like the world must just look and
smell very different. If poop is delicious to you, or

(05:13):
or even without even getting into idea of it's delicious
or not, but if it is, under any circumstances nutritional. Yeah,
so it really turns things on its head. But let's
talk about some of the reasons, like the basic reasons
that excrement consumption might be desirable for an animal before
we get into species specific examples. Sure, well, one is

(05:35):
obviously going to be that feces contain nutrients. I mean,
by the time they come out of you, you have
not gotten all the possible nutrition from it. That's right.
Given digestive system does the best it can to break
down the nutrients it needs from a meal, and then
it passes on the rest. But sometimes it can't digest
everything of value in there, and this may require the

(05:55):
creature itself or another scavenger to give all or part
of the excrement a second pass, maybe even a third pass,
who knows. And also you have to consider the different
species require different kinds of nutrients. So what might not
be all that useful to you, or you might possess
an excess in order to excrete in waste might be
something that is very useful to a different organism. Yeah,

(06:17):
and two other points here too that certainly we'll get
into examples of are that that first of all, you
definitely think of you can think of that poop sometimes
as a as a first draft. You know, not everything
is finished, not everything has been been harvested. And then
also think about what the human digestive system does. It
takes the energy in the form of plant and or flesh,

(06:40):
and it transforms that into a form that can be
absorbed and digested, and it doesn't all take place like
in your throat. You know, it's it's taking place at
at at various points throughout a given creatures digestive system.
Now that the next big reason, of course, relates to
the microbiome. Yes, and this is huge. It's just sort

(07:00):
of coming into focus, I think in in the past
few decades, how enormously important the microbiome is. How your
gut flora is. It determines a lot about how your
body works and who you are, right and the gut
floor is reflected not only in what's going on inside
of you, but also in what is coming out of you.

(07:21):
So you know, we we don't like to think of
ourselves as a worm, obviously, and we don't like to
think of ourselves as an organism at all. But if
we do, we tend to think of ourselves as a
single organism, splendid, perfect ape. I am an animal, I
am one thing. Yeah, I'm the animal even But of
course there's more to us than all of that. We're
a multi cellular construction of maddening complexity, and we're literally

(07:45):
host to an ecological community of commencial, synthiotic, and pathogenic
micro organisms. We're learning more and more about the role
that our microbiome plays every day. Certainly but it certainly
plays an important role in digestion, and one microbiome can
make certain diets more advantageous, and when out of balance,
can lead to illness. So, for an extreme example, and

(08:07):
one that I think ties in nicely with today's episode,
just can consider uh, fecal microbiotic transplants f m t s.
This was all over the news and you know, comedians
had a big time with it. Sounds crazy, Yeah, Like
I feel like it certainly sounded crazy years ago, but
less so today. I feel like at this point, everybody's
kind of like, oh, yeah, that that that makes sense.

(08:29):
They're gonna be situations where the microbiome needs to be restored,
and to do so, a fecal transplant is sometimes the answer.
But what's crazy is this, to a very large extent,
is an example of the modern Is it basically the
modern medical version of exactly what some animals are doing
when they consume feces. We just have more elegant uh

(08:52):
and uh, you know, modern delivery system in place. If
you want a more palatable analogy, just think about all
of the commercials for probiotic yogurt and stuff. Yeah, exactly,
this is the probiotic yogurt. Of the animal world. They
can't go and uh and and and buy something at
their local grocery store. Uh. They have a more old
fashioned and effective means of taking care of the scenario. Now,

(09:15):
these cases we've been talking about, our cases where it's
clearly part of an animal's natural life cycle to consume
feces to get something that it needs, whether that is
living microbes or some kind of nutrients. But there are
also probably cases where coprophagia is a sign that something
is wrong, right, I mean, animals and captivity may engage

(09:37):
in coprophagia. Puppy male dogs, for instance, can learn to
confuse dog food with feces due to the horrid conditions
in which they are sometimes raised. Adult elephants may engage
in it due to captivity issues, and certainly, as we
may touch on at the very end of the episode,
humans may engage in such behavior due to dementia. But again,

(09:58):
human coprophagia is is very rare with the animals. I
feel like, once once we take into account the cases
where it makes sense and is a part of their
natural behavior, even the unnatural cases make a little bit
more sense, you know, because with the human if a
human consumes of feces. It is a human doing something

(10:19):
that does not make sense within uh at any other
point in humans life, whereas a dog a puppy, say,
eating feces is is doing something perhaps out of place
or out of in a frequency that doesn't sit well
with their natural behavior, but is not unheard of in
their natural behavior. Well, maybe we should talk about the

(10:41):
idea of coprophasia as a natural behavior of dogs, because
I so I can't speak directly to coprophasia, but I
go out walking my dog and it is clear to me,
based on the directions that the dog pulls, that feces
are incredibly interesting to him. He's very interested in getting

(11:03):
up close to them. I've never let him linger there
with enough time to see what he would do if
the smelling were allowed to evolve into munching. I don't
know if that would happen, but I've often suspected now
there could be other stuff going on there. For one thing,
I think feces probably a lot of these feces are
dog feces, and they probably contain a lot of interesting

(11:26):
sensory information smell wise, like he can learn about the
other dogs in the area by smelling the poop, I
would assume, I mean probably just food interest. Yeah. I
mean it's worth remembering that dogs live in an entirely
different sense world in regard to smell. Yeah. But but
I also do wonder like, Okay, if I wasn't there
to pull him away, to gently drag him back on

(11:48):
the leash, would he eat these feces? Well? I certainly
no other dog owners who have to deal with, say
the dog trying to get into get at the cat litter, Yes,
to eat cat feces, yes, for example, And we're we're
about to touch on that as well. Uh. I feel
like this is probably the example of coprophasia that that

(12:10):
our listeners are most well acquainted with um because dogs
are popular pets and they do engage in this kind
of behavior from time to time. And I mentioned it
can be quite disruptive of the sort of anthropomorphizing we
often do with our pets. Right, we teach them like
we treat them like little fur babies, and if the names, yeah,

(12:32):
and if and even the food we pick out the
artificial uh, I mean the the prepackaged of food that
we purchase for our animals. I mean those are foods
that are marketed to appeal to both dogs but also
to humans, where the humans are like, yeah, that's the
kind of thing that I would eat if I were
a dog. And so the idea then of of of

(12:52):
consuming cat feces is generally kind of repugnant, and we
have to I'm I'm I'm guessing there probably comes a
point in any kind of like dog ownership. I mean,
I feel like there's certainly that point in cat ownership
to where you you really have to to remind yourself, oh, yeah,
this is an animal, and it's and it's living in
a strange environment by hanging out in my house all

(13:12):
or most of the time. But so when coprophigia occurs
in dogs, I guess there are a couple of questions
we could ask. First is how common is it? And
second is why are they doing that? So, first of all,
it is a minority of dogs that eat poop, but
not a tiny minority. Aeen study in the journal Veterinary
Medicine and Science by Heart at All used a large

(13:35):
survey of dog owners to look at specifically that the
question was about dogs eating dog feces. This study is
not about dogs just eating poop in general. Maybe other animals,
and it found the following. About seventy seven percent of
dog owners had never seen their dog eating poop, about
twenty three percent had seen their dog eating poop at

(13:55):
least once, and about sixteen percent had seen their dog
eating poops six or more times, so about a quarter
try it at least once within view of a human.
Roughly one in six dogs seem to eat poop a lot,
and the lead author on that study was a veterinarian
named Benjamin Hart, who directs the Center for Animal Behavior
You See, Davis. One thing you might notice if you

(14:18):
google like why is my dog eating poop? Is you'll
get websites of self proclaimed dog experts of all kinds offering, uh,
you know, many different answers, and speaking to Karen Bruillard
in an article for The Washington Post, Heart said that
the reason you get all these different answers is that
nobody knows for sure why dogs eat poop, and they're

(14:38):
basically all just guessing. Fortunately, Heart says that this behavior
is gross as it might seem, is not usually dangerous
to the dog's health. But does Heart have an answer
about why dogs do it in the first place. Well,
not a definitive one, but the authors of the twenty
eight team paper do have a hypothesis and it goes
something like this, So modern dogs are descended from some

(14:59):
ancestral variety of wolf, and wolves don't like poop within
their own den. They they like to go out somewhere
away from the den to do their stuff. And this
is probably an evolved defensive behavior because the feces of
wild wolves often contain the eggs of intestinal parasites like
hookworms or pinworms or cosidia, and there there could be

(15:21):
genes probably selecting for behaviors that would help prevent your
brothers and sisters and other close relatives in the pack
from catching your intestinal parasites. However, maybe sometimes you get
a sick wolf, a sick wolf that's in the pack
and is not able to leave the den in order
to poop. In that case, it would actually make sense
to eat poop within the den as quickly as possible,

(15:44):
since it usually takes a couple of days for parasite
eggs in poop to hatch and become dangerous. So rather
than let the poop in the den just sit there
for a couple of days and become a potential bio hazard.
There could be a selection pressure favoring an impulse in
wolves and their dog descendants to immediately eat fresh poop

(16:04):
within the den before it goes over the edge and
becomes a risk. And this hypothesis is actually consistent with
another thing that researchers have found about dog coprophagia, which
was that in dogs who eat who do eat poop,
more than eight percent prefer poop that is fresh, no
more than two days old, you know. On the other hand,
James Serpel, a professor of veterinary medicine at U PEN,

(16:28):
was also quoted in that post piece, and Sir Pell
says he finds that the din cleaning hypothesis for coprophagia,
that that could be plausible. That might be the case,
But Sirple also points out that poop eating dogs tended
more often to be rated by their owners as generally
greedy eaters. And that's a quote greedy eaters. So we

(16:48):
can't rule out the possibility that the cause is simply
dogs with a strong scavenging instinct and some large and
indiscriminate appetites looking for a bit of extra nutrition. Well,
let's take a quick rake and then when we come back,
we will explore coprophagia among elephants. Thank you, thank you.
All right, we're back, So Robert, it's time to talk

(17:09):
about elephant coprophagia. So obviously, there's nothing cuter than an
elephant calf than a baby elephant. You know. It's just like,
if someone shows me a YouTube video of a baby
elephant doing pretty much anything, I'm gonna watch it. I
don't know, what about a screeching adult possum, Well, that's
fun too. I also really like it when skunks stand
on their their fore legs and wave their their hinders

(17:32):
in the air. I'm pretty much game for any animal video.
But there's something about an elephant calf, you know, it's
just so adorable. I think it has something to do
with the the large head with the kind of wispy hair,
do you know what I'm talking about? The triggers. I
think some of the baby schema instinct like that. The

(17:55):
part of the idea of the baby scheme as that
we are we are triggered with, uh you know, like
caregiving instincts when we see a creature with a large
forehead and apparently large brain case because it looks kind
of like the proportions of a human baby and baby elephants.
They strike me as being kind of like that, right,
And then they start eating a little poop, and we're

(18:16):
not sure where we're how we're supposed to feel about
the whole situation. And this is in the wild, mind you,
this is observed in the wild. This is not just
a zoo thing or anything. Um, So it leads us
to ask, you know, what purpose could this serf? Well,
the poop contains vital bacteria for breaking down plant cellulus,
and by consuming some of its mom's dung, an elephant

(18:36):
calf essentially gets that microbiome boost towards the consumption of food.
So it's it's vital in them making that leap from
just just sustaining themselves on their mother's milk to actually
eating as an adult or semi adult elephant. And then
they're also going to get some nourishment out of the
deal as well as roughly two thirds of an elephant's

(18:57):
diet uh ends up coming out the other end undigested.
I guess this would be a diet heavy and rough
plant matter. Oh, yeah, you know it. So they're they're
eating elephants obviously eat a ton they're eating a lot
of plant matter, but even their impressive anatomy is only
able to absorb so much of it. By the way,

(19:21):
speaking of elephant poop, uh, it's pretty incredible as well
due to its a seed distribution. Powers. This was kind
of a tangent I happened upon in my research. You know,
we often forget this about this when we're considering the
ecological impact of elephants and h and also you know
some of the ramvoications of their dwindling numbers. But just
consider the Asian elephant, which has lost its habitat and

(19:44):
ninety percent of its population over the last century. Um.
And these stats come from on the Importance of Elephant
Poop by Sarah Zelinsky, published in Science News. She points
to a two thousand fifteen ecology publication by a Secca
at all uh that points to three plant species in
particular that have evolved to benefit from elephant seed distribution,

(20:07):
including the so called elephant apple apple, which I was
not familiar with. Um. Most animals can't actually eat the
elephant apple because it's just so tough, and as with
wild guava, which is another example of this, it's far
more likely to germinate if it passes through an elephant
rather than say a cow or a buffalo. So key.
Key here, of course is the fact that the seed

(20:27):
itself has to be undigested in order to actually germinate
and grow new plants. Yeah, and there of course a
number of plants that depend on distribution methods like this,
like the an animal eats the fruit and then poops
the seeds out somewhere, often helping transport the seeds somewhere
along the way. Yeah, I feel like this is something
this kind of comes back to how humans perceive poop.

(20:49):
We we tend to think again with that that sort
of worm analogy. On one end of the worm is food,
delicious food, and on the other end is just poop,
just utter utter law. It's heaven and hell. You know
it's good and evil. But really, you're and most animals
would be able to attest to this, have the gift
of reason and language that the poop still has a

(21:10):
lot of good in it. It's not just this, uh,
this transformation from like you know, a hundred zero, it's
not heaven in hell. It's more like dinner and leftovers.
And you might find, in fact that the leftovers have
already been conveniently cut up into pieces for you exactly.
I should also point out that this has been a
practice among elephants and elephant can for quite some time. Uh.

(21:32):
There was a forty two thousand year old baby female
mammoth double lube and she was found to have adult
mammoth poop in her digestive system. This seems to be
just a part of how you first of all, wean
and then also prepare the the the microbiota of the
young elephant calf. Now speaking of similar large mammals with

(21:54):
also very cute babies, I was reading just a little
bit about the importance in the the freshwater food chain
of some rivers of hippo poop. You know, hippo has
to do a similar thing. They come up out of
the water to eat a whole bunch of you know,
rough plant matter, and then they retreat back into the
water to just poop it all out, poop it all
out straight into the water. Uh. And this this ends

(22:18):
up forming an important nutrition source for fish and other
organisms downstream. But of course, too much hippo poop can
lead to problems like eutrophication, where there's too many nutrients
in the water. I imagined. This is one of one
of the many challenges of keeping hippos in an artificial
environment is having to clean up water all the time. Oh,
I was actually reading something about this. Uh, I wish

(22:40):
I could remember the details. But in regards to uh,
Pablo Escobar's hippos, yes, his his hippos which are sweat
supposedly still running amok something like that. Yeah. Um, I
also remember I've done some hippo poop research in the past. Um,
actually a fair amount of, I guess just hippo aanous research,
because you've got like a special variety of leech that

(23:03):
is only attracted to the hippoanus. They also do that
great thing with their tails, the spinning. Yeah, it's the
whirling tail poopy go around. Yeah, it's like a sprinkler
system for fresh hippo feces. Well, now that we have
that image in your head, let's turn to what I
think might be the most impressive variety of coprophagic organisms.

(23:25):
This would be the order Lego Morpha, or the Lego morphs.
Bunny rabbits, yeah, rabbits, hairs pike has presumably the easter
bunny as well. I don't know, I think I warned
people when we mentioned this episode was coming up that
they would be treated to an utter ruination of the
cuteness of bunnies. But maybe instead, if you're open minded enough,

(23:45):
this will even expand your bunny cuteness appreciation and higher
dimensions of consciousness. I think I'm more in that that
that area. Like when I first started looking into it,
I was like, yeah, maybe this is a little gross,
but no, like, no, this is amazing. Like I'm not
sure I had any reason to find wonderment in bunnies
and rabbits before, you know, accepted if it's some sort

(24:08):
of cool predation method by something that eats them. But no, this,
this is amazing what we're going to talk about here,
and it forces you to rethink not only rabbits, but
I think digestion itself. Okay, so what does normal rabbit
feeding look like? What are they eating? What do they do? Oh? Well,
you know they're eating carrots the cartoons, if they've taught
me correctly, you know they're they're eating plants. They're in

(24:30):
a diet with a lot of a lot of greens
and uh and you know the gardens of English gardeners
when they can get in there though. Funny side fact,
I was actually just reading a paper that mentioned some
opportunistic carnivory of rabbits, not of rabbits by rabbits. Oh,
that would make sense given everything we've learned about squirrels. Yeah,

(24:53):
I think this was an isolated case. It's not like
this is super common, but it had at least been observed. Well,
they've also been observed plenty of times engaging in coprophagia,
and it's actually a clever way by which they overcome
some of the shortcomings of their digestive systems. So their
hind gut fermenters, and what does that mean. What means
that the bacterial fermentation that breaks down much of the

(25:15):
plant matter they consume, it takes place in the hind gut.
In rabbits, this is in the secum and and so yeah,
you're having all of this, like vital breakdown of the
material taking place rather late in the process. And yet
most of the nutrient absorption takes place in the stomach
and the small intestines, which is of course earlier in

(25:38):
the process. So you have this weird situation where there's
so much of the nutrients that they need are not
really coming online until it's basically poop ready for depositings.
So it's kind of like one of those movies where
the plot doesn't make sense until everything comes together right
at the end. Kind of you kind of need to
see it again after you've seen it to put everything

(25:59):
together exactly. It's also worth noting that we're dealing with
creatures that are small, gutted and uh and have very
high metabolisms, which also plays into the scenario. So what's
the what's the rabbit to do? Why you simply run
it all through again you watch the movie again. Uh
and but but it's more elegant than that. It's it's
more amazing than simply okay, well they're they're poops, still

(26:21):
have a lot of nutrients, so they eat their poop again.
They have two types of poop WHOA, so they have
poop toggling. Essentially, they produce what is called a sika
trope or night feces or night poops, if you will.
While normal daytime feces is brown and hard, the night
poops are dark, soft and coated in mucus, and these

(26:42):
they eat up right away. Generally, this has taking place,
I understand, like basically the early more the early hours
of the morning, uh hand, or you know, the the
very latest portion of the night. However you want to
slice it, thus night poops, and they eats up up
so swiftly that I'm to understand that many pet owners
don't even know what's happening. Uh, And in doing this

(27:04):
they absorb those vital nutrients on the second pass. In fact,
if a rabbit doesn't eat its night nightpoops, that means
there's something wrong with it. So according to help Doc,
my rabbit is not engaging in coprophagia exactly. I mean,
that's basically the reversal we see, the reversal of human
expectations for coprophasia. According to the Cornell veterinarian paper Coprophasia

(27:28):
and Animals, a review by Slave and Brand, the night
poops are quote swallowed like pills, and in the case
of the pika for instance, uh, the night poops are
essentially a mix of partially digested moss and gut bacteria.
And it's actually six times more nutritious than the moss itself.
So it's almost like cooking increases the nutritional profile of food. Well,

(27:51):
we've talked about it fro from the human perspective, cooking
is the externalization of digestion. It's technological digestion. Yeah, so yeah,
this is this is cooking via the pike a gut.
They also point out that young rabbits begin eating their
mother's night poops before moving onto the consumption of their own.
So again we see this kind of weaning process similar
to what we saw in elephants. And uh. This also

(28:14):
supply supplies nitrogen, protein, sulfur, and vitamins, and up to
on consumption of night poop may be necessary for these
creatures to intake adequate levels um um of these substances. Okay,
so now that we have expanded your mind about cute bunnies,
I assume it will be less of a leap for

(28:34):
people to find out that rats consume feces. Right. Oh yeah,
I feel like this should be a no brainer, like
it really, I think people are going to be surprised
that they don't eat as much poop as as rabbits do.
But a single rat consumes a varying amount of its
own dung. We're talking between five and fifty percent of
its own fecal output. And as with rabbits, we see
some key nutrients in here made absorbable via that first

(28:58):
round of digestion, and it's a way for them to
hit target absorption levels prevent them from eating their own poop.
And young rats experience a depression and growth rate of
about fifteen and it's especially useful as a way for
them to make up for shortfalls in their natural dietary nutrients.
So whereas human adults tell human children like don't drink coffee,

(29:21):
that will stunt your growth, your adult rats would tell
their their rat pups, don't not eat your poop, that
will stunt your growth. Exactly. It's also been observed to
boost the rats and microbiotic performance. And in fact, thiamine
is produced in the rats intestinal tract and is not absorbed.
They have to eat it then to pick it up.

(29:41):
So if rats are are permitted from eating their own feces,
such as with a laboratory via laboratory tail cup, you'll
have to add vitamin K to their diets to make
up for it. And similarly, they require B complex if
not allowed to ingest their own feces. And with rats,
just as we saw with with with rabbits, it begins
with the young eating the mother's feces with the pheromonal

(30:05):
encouragement of the practice. Maternal rat feces contains high levels
of the oxycolic acid that's lacking and pre weened weaning rats,
and this is a steroid that promotes immune development in
the intestinal tract. So part of what you're saying is
that when you find rat poop in the back of
a kitchen cabinet or something, there actually probably was originally
more rat poop there and they just they took some

(30:27):
of it along with them. I'm not sure on that,
you know, I'm not sure when they're I don't think
it was really reflected in this main uh Suave and
Brand paper, like when they're eating the poop, if this
is only occurring like mostly close to home, or if
it's going to occur in your cabinet potentially. Now, another
animal that is famous for wallowing in its own filth,

(30:48):
of course, is yield poor sign that's right, uh, the pig.
And this is another animal where people would be like, yeah,
that that that makes sense. A pick would probably eat
its own poop. Um adult pig poop is rich in iron,
and piglets will, according to Suave and Brand, consume about
twenty grams of maternal feces per day, and this plays
a role in preventing iron deficiency anemia in the piglets.

(31:10):
Now beyond the realm of pigs, it's also been seen
in non human primates, with B twelve and fatty acids
coming into play for some monkeys, but it does not
serve as a major source of nutrients in non human primates.
Will come back to non human primates in a bit.
In horses, however, between the second and fifth week after birth,

(31:31):
a full will apparently eat part of the mother's feces,
and it also occurs in mature horses that have low
protein diets. I'd like to just read a quote from
that Suave and Brand paper. Actually they say quote. Coprophagia
is essential for some species of animals, providing nutrients which
contribute to growth, development, and maturation of the animals. The

(31:52):
practice must be considered in the interpretation of comparative investigations
done with coprophagous and non cooperate agus animals. The impact
of coprophasia in laboratory studies using rodents and rabbits could
seriously influence test results, especially in the fields of nutrition, microbiology, pharmacology,
and toxicology. So what they're saying is science needs to

(32:15):
take way more poop eating into account. Basically, Yeah, and
this is something I still reflected in some other papers
I looked at where they said, there's just there hasn't
been enough research on some species and they're they're poop eating.
I mean, certainly rabbits have received a lot of attention,
but but this is a this is an interesting point
about especially UH lab mice and rats that we're studying

(32:38):
to understand so many things about about human physiology. Now
while we're on the subject of animals that are probably
less surprising to find out that they that they engage
in some poop eating. Obviously, insects and invertebrates of various
kinds are going to figure big into this kind of picture.
In fact, I remember I had a biology teacher ones

(32:59):
who was talking about his expeditions to the jungles of
South America, and he talked about how you know, in
the morning, if you if you were out in the rainforest,
and you would you would venture out away from the
camp to release a large bowel movement. After the coffee hour, UH,
you could basically sit there and watch it become a

(33:20):
chemical beacon for invertebrate forest life, where we're slowly thinking
all these insects and different kinds of species would just
descend on it from all around. And uh, that image
is stuck with me ever since I would kind of
like to see that. Yeah, it's far It's a far
different scenario in our urban environment, where if you go
out and poop on the sidewalk in the morning, you

(33:43):
may attract attention. But but but may I don't know.
I'm joking, But I mean it's not like we don't
have a lot of insect life in the city. Yeah,
I guess we do. Yeah, I mean you will certainly
see flies on poop. I mean it's a cliche for
a reason. Now. One of the most impressie consumers of
of poop in the insect world is, of course, the

(34:04):
dung beetle. These are amazing animals they are and um,
and yeah, I think we tend to be cool with
the dung beetle. I mean, the dung beetle is kind
of funny because of what it's doing, especially if you're
watching a variety of dung beetle that rolls the poop away.
How come dung beetles don't seem as gross to us
as the flies and maggots that land on poop. I

(34:25):
think part of it is that they're generally we're generally
when we're watching videos of it, we're watching dung beetles
that are rolling away like animal poop, and yeah, animal poop,
and specifically herbivore poop, which tends to be far nicer poop. Like, really,
if you have to, if I had to deal with
a bunch of poop, like just to scoop it, you know,
give me, give me horsepoop the day of the week,

(34:46):
it looks more like mud with some hay in it, right,
And basically it is. I mean, just think back to
the elephant poop example and all the all the stuff
that is still in there unabsorbed. But we have a
lot of different types of dung beetles. I've seen the number.
I've seen it as low as five thousand, but I've
also seen it sited is like eight thousand different species

(35:06):
of dung beetles, and they can be found on every
continent except Antarctica. They thrive in numerous environments as well,
not just grasslands. So I feel like sometimes we have
a false idea of dung beetles just based on seeing
like one or two segments in a nature documentary, and
they given their name implies they subsist almost exclusively on

(35:28):
the extrement of other organisms, although they can sometimes feast
on carrion leaf, litter, mushrooms, and decaying fruit. Some of
the species famously roll balls of dung away from the pile.
Everybody's seen this, like the the image of them pushing
it like a boulder, like somebody in tartar Us. You know,
Oh yeah, because that's one of the things they make.
They make a bee line, they make a straight line,

(35:49):
and they use some incredible strength and also some some
fairly incredible navigation U techniques to to really pull this off,
because they have to be fast. A dung, as we've discussed,
loses its nutritional punch rather quickly. Uh So it has
to the ones that actually roll it away. They have
to roll it away in a straight line, get it
somewhere where they can deal with it, and they might

(36:10):
have to deal with competing dung beetles on the way.
Now you might not know the answer to this, but
why is it that dung loses its nutritional value over time?
Is it? Uh? Is it the microbes in it that
are consuming a lot of the nutrients. I think that
is the case. Yeah, I mean, and it's almost like
the dung is alive and dying, you know, and it

(36:31):
has to be uh, it has to be dealt with
whether quickly. Um. Now, I mentioned that you know varieties
that roll, they're dung. While rollers are certainly the most famous,
there are also tunnelers, so they tunneled down into the poop.
And then there are dwellers that dwell atop the poop. Um.
So these are the things that the mountain. Yeah, basically

(36:51):
there's king of the mountain, there's king under the mountain,
and then there's he who rolls poop away from the mountain. Uh.
And those are the three categories the at of poop. Now,
according to Believe it's Dr John M. Capinera. A one
point five kilogram or three point three pound load of
elephant dung was observed to attract sixteen thousand dung beetles

(37:14):
who eight buried and rolled it away in less than
two hours. Less than two hours. That's that's incredible, and
that's that's difficult to imagine. But you know, if you
have an entire swarm of dung beetles. I almost don't
believe that two hours all by insects. Well, well, maybe
we'll check that in qua and make sure that holds true. No,

(37:35):
I'm sure I believe it. I believe it all right. Well,
according to the San Diego Zoo, the average domestic cow
drops dung like ten to twelve times per day, and
each pat of poop can produce up to three thousand
flies within two weeks. In some parts of Texas, dune
beetles bury about eighty percent of cattle dunge. So just
imagine what life would be like without dung beetles around

(37:59):
to to con whom the poop Robert, That sounds like
a messy planet it would be. But thank thank God
for the dung beetles. All right, let's take a quick
break and when we come back, we will discuss picture
plants than alright, we're back this time with a non
animal feces consumer. Well, it's much less surprising, I guess,

(38:21):
than animals eating poop to hear of plants benefiting from poop,
because obviously, you know, you could think about fertilizer and
stuff like that. They're there are nutrients in poop that
can sink into the soil and nourish the roots of
a tree or something like that. But I want to
talk about a more direct kind of fecal gobbling by plants,
and that would be, of course, the case of picture plants.

(38:42):
Now we've discussed picture plants on the show before. These
are generally carnivorous plants with these picture cup shaped leaves
that form a pit trap. And the general predation strategy
of these carnivorous plants goes like this. So you have
a delicious smelling chemical lure, some kind of actor or
something to attract insects to your picture, and then the

(39:04):
insects land and try to feed, or at least try
to investigate, but the edges of the picture slippery, and
then the insect falls into a pool of liquid down
inside the cupped leaf. Now, once in the liquid, the
insect dies, and then the body is digested by enzymes
down in the pit, and the plant of course feeds. Now.
This is often especially important because the picture plant needs

(39:26):
those arthur pod bodies is a source of nitrogen, which
is a crucial nutrient for them, and which is often
scarce in the kinds of soil where the picture plants
tend to grow, which can be like swampy soil or
like heath soil, just not very nitrogen rich. But a
curious thing has happened to some picture plants. Some seem
to have evolved a taste for poop. And now I

(39:48):
was reading a great piece in National Geographic by Ed Young,
one of our favorite science writers, about the picture plant
Nepenthes hymnslayan a. And so there were some researchers that
Ed was talking about. One was Omar Graph from the
University of Brunei, Jerusalem, and he noticed something odd about
this species of plant to pen these Hymns layana. It

(40:11):
was sort of low on fluid compared to other picture plants,
and it also didn't release obvious chemical attractants for insects,
and it tended to have about seven times fewer insects
than the pictures of other species. Now, instead of insects
in the pictures, there were often bats. There were a
type of bat known as Hardwick's wooly bat or Cravoula hardwicki, roosting,

(40:36):
sometimes roosting as families inside the plants. And so Graph
work together with Caroline and Michael Schooner from the University
of Greifswald to investigate the apparent mutualism between bats and
picture plants. Obviously there's some kind of relationship going on here.
What is it. You've got big pictures that bats can
fit inside, very little fluid, very few insects. But of

(41:00):
course the pictures were full of you guess it, poop
bat feces, also known as guano, which is incidentally a
great source of nitrogen. Now, the researchers found that the
plants were getting so much nitrogen from the guano that
they didn't need to kill nearly as many insects. So
here's the question, how did the pictures attract the bats?

(41:21):
Because bats navigate mostly by echolocation, they determined shapes in
their surroundings by making sounds and then listening for those
sounds to bounce back off the objects in the environment,
forming a three D sonic map. And there are similar
shaped other species of picture plants in the forest, and
there's just a lot of stuff in the forest to
sort of like muck up your view. So how did

(41:43):
the himsleana plants attract the bats? The researchers mentioned before
teamed up with Ralph Simon of the University of Erlangen, Nuremberg,
who helped out by bringing along a robotic bath head
and so ed Wrights quote. The team found that the
back wall of in salayan a, the bit that connects
its lid to its main chamber, is unusually wide, elongated,

(42:06):
and curved. It's like a parabolic dish. It strongly reflects
incoming ultrasound in the direction it came from and over
a large area. Other picture plants that live in the
same habitat don't have this structure. Instead, their back walls
reflect incoming calls off to the sides. So as the
wooly bats pepper the forest with high pitched squeaks, the

(42:28):
echoes from in Him's leana should stand out like a beacon.
So the researchers also tested this apparent function by modifying
some of the plants sort of hidden among shrubbery in
a tin full of bats to see if it would
change the rate at which the bats were attracted to
the plants, and it did. In a paper published in
Current Biology, UH, the authors found that if you took

(42:51):
one of these plants and you sort of amputated its
reflective surfaces, the bats couldn't find it as quickly and
ed writes quote and when given a choe as they
mostly entered pictures with natural, unaltered reflectors. So here's a
case where the plant has evolved to instead of specializing
in capturing, trapping, and eating insects, it specializes in providing

(43:14):
a good home for bats to poop in it, and
even changing its own shape over the generations to become
a better attractor of bats because it reflects the sounds
they make better. Now, this is not the only picture
plant that has come to specialize in receiving poop as
a as a main part of its diet. There's another
picture plant called a Nepenthes lowy that does something similar

(43:36):
by functioning as a kind of delicious toilet for tree
shrews in borneo u. The young versions of this plant
tend to trap ants and other insects like a normal
picture plant would, but the more mature plants, which grow
up higher in the air on vines and other plants,
they attract tree shrews with sweet nectar, and while the
shrews are perched on the plant licking the nectar, the

(43:58):
shrews poop inside the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to the
plant and In fact, the mature aerial plants really don't
trap many insects at all. They just want poop, that's all.
It's just tree shrew come and poop in me. And
they've evolved to specialize in this. While most carnivorous picture
plants have these slippery rims I mentioned, right, you know,
they want a slippery side on the pictures, so the

(44:20):
insects fall in, the mature uh plants of the low
E species don't have a slippery rim. Instead, they've got
a rim that the tree shrew can stand on safely
and poop comfortably. After all, like you wouldn't design a
human toilet with like a lubricated seat, right, you know,
you don't want people slipping around. So I also found
another more recent study by the same authors of that

(44:42):
study ed Young road about and isn't at gop s,
but with some other authors in a Journal of Ecology
in two seventeen, called ecological outsourcing. A picture plant benefits
from transferring predigestion of prey to a bat mutualist uh
So they point out here that you know, mutualism is
a type of symbiosis between two species in which both

(45:02):
species gain a net benefit from the interaction. UH classic
examples would be like animals in their gut flora. The
gut flora gets something out of it, you get something
out of it. But also like flowering plants and pollinating insects,
where the insect might get nectar and the plant might
get reproductive material spread around, you both get a net positive.
And so the authors point out that lots of ecologists

(45:24):
believe that a lot of times mutualism seems to evolve
when a service that an organism originally had to perform
for itself could be done better by another species. And
the authors refer to this as quote ecological outsourcing. So
an example would be a plant that used to have some,
you know, very ineffective way of spreading pollen around, but

(45:46):
then insects began spreading the pollen in a much more
efficient and targeted way. But of course, how would you
test that it evolved this way. Well, the authors came
up with a way to test this using that relationship
I mentioned earlier between the picture plant nipenhees hims lana
and Hardwick's wooly bat, the care Caravoula hardwicki. And so
the picture plant houses the bat like we said, the

(46:08):
bat poops inside the plant gets necessary nitrogen, and the
authors write about their method quote, we measured the benefits
of ecological outsourcing by comparing survival growth, photosynthesis, and nutrient
content of in Him's Leona plants fed with bat feces
to those fed with arthropods. To investigate the costs of
such outsourcing processes, we repeated the experiment with the closest relative,

(46:32):
Nepenthees rafless Cianna that is not adapted to digest bat feces.
So the authors found that Him's Leyana plants fed on
a diet of poop had better survival growth and photosynthesis
than plants of the same species that were given only
insects instead. Quote. On average, plants covered nine of their
nitrogen demand from feces under strong nutrient deprivation. But what

(46:56):
about those non poop adapted species of plant that got
to try out a poop diet in this experiment The
author's right quote, Despite raf. Lysiana's higher arthropod capture rate,
feces covered a large part of this species nutrient demand
as well, suggesting low costs for outsourcing. And then, finally,

(47:16):
the author's right quote, outsourcing pre capture and digestion to
the mutualism partner seems to be a beneficial strategy for
in Him's leana. It may explain the evolutionary trend of
several carnivorous plants to lose their carnivorous traits while increasing
their attractiveness to mutualistic partners. On a much broader scale,
we propose that ecological outsourcing could be one of the

(47:38):
major drivers for the evolution and maintenance of mutualisms. So,
in other words, you can think of the bats as
providing a kind of predigestion service for the picture plant.
The bat eats the nitrogen rich food source, breaks it down,
then releases it into the plant's mouth. It makes sense, right,
Why eat the insects directly when you can eat this

(47:59):
byproduct of the insects at the bad eats. Yeah, And
it also makes me think about you know, when we've
talked about the possible origins of predations in the Cambrian period,
like if organisms we don't know that this happened, but
just if it's possible that predation began when scavenging or
organisms eating sort of like dead other animal matter just

(48:20):
sort of transitioned to live animals. Uh, this could be
a sort of like backward transition of that kind, right, yeah,
I think so, And and again it also forces us
to rethink what is going on in digestion, what is
going on in the transformation from food to poop? Totally
all right, So I want to come back to humans again.

(48:42):
So at this point, yeah, if you don't want to
hear about human coveraphagia, um, maybe you want to check
out for this episode. But hopefully at this point we've
demystified it a bit, uh, and you're ready to hear
a little bit about humans and also some of our
our our ape relatives. So of course, human a prophagia
has long been the subject of various curses, insults, and

(49:04):
of course art. I think we can all think to
to various um works of literature or cinema that the
drag out coprophagia is, especially as I've seen it popular
in like nineteen seventies cinema, especially avant garde stuff where
they want to I guess say something like really like
stark and disturbing about the nature of human existence. Yes,

(49:27):
the spirit of the Marquis assad Yeah, yeah, there's a
lot of of of of poop eating in that for sure. Um.
But really, I mean any amount of poop eating tends
to stand out in the work and and and you
run the risk of it overshadowing everything else that you're
attempting to do. A couple of cinematic high points low points,
uh that come to mind in this area. There's, of course, uh,

(49:49):
the scene in John Waters Pink Flamingos in which the
actor Divine eats dog feces. And I later heard an
interview from him talking with the Fresh Air Terry Gross
about and talked about like calling the doctor afterwards and
claiming that a child had eaten dog feces and he
wanted to see, if, you know, if the child was
going to get sick, and the doctor was like reassuring

(50:11):
him that it would, you know, would probably be okay. Um.
Another great scene, of course is the scene in Caddy
Shack where Bill Murray's character retrieves the suspected feces which
is actually a candy bar from the bottom of the
pool and uh and and holds it up, sniffs it
and invites into it. But anyway, the point here is
that for humans is largely something that's relegated to the

(50:32):
room of madness, perversion, and horror. It's also been done
as an act of protest, and indeed it's it's considered
an extraordinary disorder of human behavior when it occurs. We're
not like those animals that sometimes eat poop for nutritional
deficiency reasons. Right, our closest ape relatives don't benefit from
the act as other animals do. Chimps have been observed

(50:53):
to do it in laboratory conditions, probably due to dietary
deficiencies or captivity induced behavioral problem. Now, as for guerrillas,
I was reading a bit about this in the primate
conservation paper UH Coprophasia and Intestinal Parasites Implications to human
habituated mountain guerrillas. This is by Grassic and Cranfield from

(51:14):
two thousand three, and they wrote that coprophasia is commonly
observed in mountain guerrillas. Adults sometimes eat their own feces
following defecation, or the old feces of other guerrillas, which
is interesting they didn't I don't think they really went
into all this and do this all that much. But
it comes back to the whole freshness thing. I wonder,
why eat the old poop? But Anyway, infants sometimes eat

(51:35):
feces of other guerrillas or other animals, and it's considered normal,
and it's been argued that the gut flora explanation is
likely valid here. It's thought that their herbivore diet likely
benefits from some level of symbian seating. However, with this
sort of practice comes the possibility of parasites, and indeed,
a survey identified forty one species of indo parasites from

(51:59):
cat to been wild guerillas, twenty nine of which can
be transmitted by coprophagia. However, they also stressed that coprophagia
has been quote generally neglected in medical parasitology, except in
mentally retarded people with behavioral apparitions such as coprophagia or
co prophilia, requiring institutionalization. Again, we're clearly a non coprophagias species.

(52:23):
It isn't a normal part of our behavior, so it's
not something we're evolved to do with much proficiency. I
was also reading an International Journal of Psychological and Brain
Sciences article titled Coprophilia feces lust in the forms of coprophagia,
coprio spheres, scatolia and plastering and dementia patients are Thoughts
and Experience, which is a good paper, but certainly, um,

(52:48):
it doesn't sound like a fund read. It's not exactly
a fun read, but it's it was insightful. It's it's
not the first thing you want to read during your
coprophagia research. But they pointed out that in primates that
the consumption of feast these may serve quote as a
behavioral adaptation that provides animals access to energy and nutrients
and maybe an important nutritional source for older and ordentally

(53:08):
impaired individuals during the dry season. Dentically impaired meaning they
just don't have the teeth to handle certain foods. Oh
I didn't even think about that. The idea that, uh,
for some animals species could be just an easier food source,
and it's something to fall back on when you can't
maybe chew up the normal kind of stuff you would
be eating. It is predigested, like you said, uh, And

(53:30):
then they suggest the following quote, Dimentia patients have a
diminished mental capacity that constantly is being reduced towards a
capacity analog to a newborn's possibly acquiring all primordial instincts. Furthermore,
as nutritional decrease in the amount eaten, which is all egophagia.
That the eating of only a few foods uh together

(53:52):
with the loss of weight, is probably the most common
disturbance in dementia UH, something that could lead in a
search for supplementary food sources. So they point out that.
They also point out the dementia can also result in
the hyper sexuality and sexually just uh inhibited behaviors, which
could also entail the sort of activity they're also known

(54:14):
to make and throw copra spheres in the manner of
other primates, which is also curious. So poop balls balls right, Um.
They reject the idea though that is linked directly to
dietary deficiency. But I feel like this this is putting
like a weird and interesting spin on it, like the
idea that it is in dementia patients, which seems to

(54:35):
be the the the only area where it really occurs.
That it is kind of this primordial return to some
like very base h like primate activities. Well that somehow
you may be a result of like instincts that are
activated but normally inhibited. Yeah yeah, so but again they

(54:55):
they say that this is an area that really needs
needs more research. Um, they said, there's actually there's not
a lot of hope for dimentia patients exhibiting this sort
of behavior, and that more study is needed, but of
course also more empathy. There's apparently a tendency in institutional
environments to provide less care to such individuals, and if
there's hope to be had, they say, it's through empathy

(55:18):
and interventions of psychological and pharmacological nature. Yeah, I can
certainly see how that could be the case. Like it's
an unfortunate case where like a very gross symptom makes
it actually harder for a person to get the care
they need, just because like the people who would be
providing the care find it repulsive or something. Yeah. Yeah,

(55:39):
and then you know, because they're also gonna be they're
gonna be dirtier because of this activity. It just and it,
and then you end up invoking all these human taboos,
which even in a clinical environment with trained professionals like
in in the best of conditions, that can see where
it would definitely be Uh, you could definitely prove a challenge.
Now to close out with something a little more fun.
From that paper, Um, they did point out that quote

(56:01):
in ancient Greece. During the orgies dedicated to the god Dionysus,
bizarre erotic fetishes were in constant use. Many depictions of
people defecating in clay pots during an orgy proved the
narcissistic erotic deviation in ancient cultures. It sounds almost judgmental, right,
But they included some images of this, uh in the

(56:24):
in the paper. That paper had had a lot of images,
a lot of a lot of photos. Um. But again,
I feel like human coprophagia uh. Though certain certainly um
a tricky subject, even it makes a lot more sense
having looked at how it works within the normal behaviors

(56:46):
of many animals. Yeah, I agree. Now I have a question, actually, yes,
is dung vegetarian? Well, a lot of the dung we've
talked about is is herbivore dung? Yeah, that be a
follow up question. I guess, does it matter whether the
dung is the dung of a carnivore of or of
a herbivore it is an animal product in a way? Well,

(57:09):
I did not. I guess maybe the question would be
as dung vegan? Well, I feel like I don't feel
like we really discussed any carnivores in this episode. I mean,
everything was at least an omnivore, if not a nerbivore. Um. Yeah,
I didn't come across any research involving carprophagia among carnivores,
so yeah, I'm not sure. Um, I didn't see any

(57:33):
articles about cats or big cats or pack hunters, So
I don't know. That's a that's a that's an interesting
question to leave out on. I'm not saying we're gonna
come back for Coprophagia Part two, but uh, but it
is worth worth looking at. Well, here's a question start
with on part two. Is dung paleo? I don't know.

(57:55):
In some respects, maybe it is that that maybe so
maybe so all right, so there we have it. We're
gonna go and close it out here. Obviously a lot
of people are gonna have some comments on this. UM.
Probably related to your pet rabbits, your pet dogs, maybe
farm animals, pet gorilla, pet gorilla's Uh, maybe you you

(58:15):
professionally have some sort of inside here. Maybe you've worked
with THEMNIA patients, you know, I've uh, we're we're up
for any kind of insight into this topic that you,
the listener may have to share with us. In the meantime,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's we'll find all the episodes of the podcast, as
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We'll find a tab for our store where you can

(58:35):
go and buy some cool merchandise, including some of the
new UH Squirrel merchandise that is coming out for Thanksgiving.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
Williams and Arry Harrison. If you would like to get
in touch with us directly, they'll let us know feedback
on this episode or any other UH to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hi, let

(58:56):
us know where you listen from, how you found out
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