02.01 – An Intro to Scat

Episode description:

No beating around the bush here. It’s time to get our hands dirty, digging into the wild world of waste. In this season we’re covering the all that of scat, the scoop on poop, giving you some words on turds and theses on feces. We’ve got a whole file of puns and a pile of fun, and lots of fascinating fecal facts that are nuttier than squirrel scat. So join us on a dive into the stinky nethers of nature’s bowels. This is the Single Acorn Podscat.

WORKS CITED

• Powdered dates (link) vs Grouse poop (link)
• Kitty litter cakes (recipe)
• Pomanders – spice balls (link)
• “Frequent Urination During High-Protein Diet” (link)
• Bodybuilding.com forum on increased rate of urination (link)
• Oryx and Crake (link)
• “Feeding Characteristics of an Amoeba Grazing upon Cyanobacteria: Food Selection, Ingestion and Digestion Progress” (link)
• “Water Transport and Biological Membranes” (p242 – link)
• Rabbit small intestines are about 5.5’ in length, large intestines 4.5’ (link)
• “Gastrointestinal and colonic segmental transit time evaluated by a single abdominal x-ray in healthy subjects and constipated patients” (link)
• “Shrew-Eating Scientists Show Humans Can Digest Bone” (link)
• Longest human poop was NOT 26’ long (it was an art piece: link)
• “Faecal firing in a skipper caterpillar is pressure-driven” (link)
• “The Physics of Poop: Why it takes you and an elephant the same amount of time to defecate“ (link)
• Two hypotheses on why sloths poop on the ground: 
  • (1) “A syndrome of mutualism reinforces the lifestyle of a sloth” (link) and 
  • (2) “A sloth risks its life every time it poops. Watch the harrowing act for yourself.” (link)
• Correction: Elephants actually produce about 150kg of feces per day
• Runner’s Diarrhea (link)
• Antipredator Behavior of Recently Metamorphosed Toads during Encounters with Garter Snakes” (link)