The Scoop on Poop Everybody Poops Remember last week when we talked about digestion? …. We discussed how food is processed and ends up in the large intestine or colon. When your body uses all the nutrients it can, it needs to eliminate the waste. That waste becomes POOP and Urine.
The Process of Elimination What you eat effects what you poop. High fiber foods like vegetables create bigger stools. So does eating raw foods. Lots of meat and completely cooked foods produce smaller, darker stools. Everybody Poops On average, people produce about an ounce of poop for every 12 pounds of body weight each time you poop. For example, a 96 lb kid might flush away a ½ pound of poop in a single session! Besides food waste, poop is also made up of worn-out blood cells, germs and worms that try to live in your gut!
Can you figure out what type of foods might change the color of your poop? Let’s try:
#1 Eating this will make your poop turn darker than normal.
Red meat will turn your poop darker. This is fine, just darker.
#2 (ha ha ha) Eating this will make your poop turn red.
The vegetable beets will turn your poop red. Fresh or pickled beets.
#3 This drink (most of you probably have it every day) will give your poop a yellowish tinge.
#3 Got Milk? ? It can make your poop have a yellowish tinge. But it still does a body good!
#4 Want to make your poop turn GREEN? Try eating this!
#4 Eat blackberries to turn your poop GREEN!
History of the toilet We all take for granted the use of a toilet – we just go to the bathroom. It wasn’t always so convenient. Imagine having to run outside in the middle of a cold night? In medieval times, some castles had toilets, but they forgot the plumbing. The toilets would empty out through small windows or long chutes into a hole in the ground or into a nearby river or moat.
History of the toilet • The ancient Romans had a goddess named Cloacina, who was in charge of toilets and sewers. STERCUTIUS was the god of odor. (Stercutius was one of Saturn’s surnames, given to him when he carpeted the earth with dung to make it fertile. ) • In the ancient Roman city of Ephesus, rich citizens sent their slaves to the public bathrooms to warm up the cold marble toilet seats for them. • English king Henry the Eighth had a toileting stool covered with black velvet and studded with 2, 000 gold nails • Toilet and Chamber pot In 1596, Sir John Harington designed a flush toilet, but buildings had no indoor plumbing to bring in water to make a toilet flush. So people kept pooping in outhouses or inside chamber pots and throwing their waste out their windows onto the city streets. The flush toilet didn’t get used for a couple of hundred years. • If you spoke French, and were a courteous person, before you pitched the contents of your chamber pot out your bedroom window (day or night) you would yell, “Gardez l’eau!” In English that means “Watch out for the water!” Instead of pronouncing “l’eau” “low, ” the chamber-pot-pitchers of England pronounced it “loo. ” With the invention of toilets, the English dropped the habit of tossing pee out windows, but they didn’t drop the term “loo. ” So, if you ever visit England, be thankful that their l’eau now stays in the loo. • Many people believe that plumber Thomas “Crapper” invented the flush toilet, but he didn’t. He did make improvements, but his name stuck. • In Iceland years ago, it was considered rude to leave the dinner table to pee. The daughter of the house would supply a chamber pot while other diners politely grunted so they couldn’t hear its user.
Waste Disposal Throughout History • In Ancient Rome, some women drank turpentine (which can be poisonous!) because it made their urine smell like roses! • Until 200 years ago, European women peed standing up because of their clothes. They wore long dresses and NO UNDERPANTS. When necessary, they could stand pee – hopefully outside – without anyone else noticing!
Waste Disposal throughout History • • • After the Roman Empire fell, there were very few public bathrooms. People on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, searched for the man who patrolled the city with a big bucket and a bigger cloak. For a price, they could us the bucket with the cape draped around them for privacy. In 1776, the president’s plumbing was the same as everyone else’s – they didn’t have any. When the White House was built, they only put one outhouse in the backyard! The flushable toilet was being worked on though, and in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson had two small rooms built, each with a toilet like device flushed by an overhead tank of rainwater. Today, there are over 35 bathrooms in the White House and the president has his own private bathroom right off the Oval Office.
Can you please spare a square? • By 1857, the printing press, bicycles and baseball had already been invented. What wasn’t was toilet paper. Joseph C. Gayetty produced the first sheets in packs of 500 and sold it for 50¢. It didn’t sell well as people didn’t want to “waste” sheets of paper • In 1890 the Scott Paper Company became the first to make toilet paper on rolls. This obviously took off - Today, Americans on average use 9 sheets per bathroom trip and a yearly average of about ¾ of a mile! • Many people in India and Arab countries DON’T USE TOILET PAPER!! They think smearing themselves with paper is a bad way to get clean. Instead, they wipe with their left hand instead, and wash up with water. Unsurprisingly, they use only their right hand when eating!
EXTREME POOP! In the Amazon rain forest, poop disposal is not a problem as one scientist discovered when he deposited a “sample” on the jungle floor. Within minutes, beetles and bees found this tasty treat and within a few hours, it had totally disappeared! High in the Andes Mountains, mothers carry babies on their backs wrapped in cloth slings. These tots spend much of their day lying in poop and pee and actually grow faster because of it! At 12, 000 feet above sea level, it is very cold and dry and harder to breathe. Being closed up with the waste creates a warm, humid space so the babies can put their energy into growing instead of staying warm. At the South Pole in Antarctica, it is -50ºF and it takes much longer to get rid of poop. The scientists there use toilets placed over deep holes drilled into the icecap. The icecap is always moving seaward, so the poop and pee go along for the ride. Today’s wad of waste will reach the ocean in about 100, 000 years! In survival training, soldiers are taught to lie on poop. Experts say that dry cowpats – with a little give in the center – make a great bed. Line them up and cover them with a poncho just in case one is still too “soft” and mushy. Warmed up by a soldier’s body, they keep the heat all night long.
Peeing in Space Astronauts on spacewalks wear disposable diapers because they are outside, away from a toilet for up to 7 hours. Since most adults don’t like to think they are wearing diapers, they call them “Maximum absorption garments” Inside the ship, things are different. In weightless conditions, anything loose – food, scraps, pens, blobs of water, etc will float around the cabin. To prevent urine and feces from floating around, astronauts pee into a funnel and a gentle suction transfers the urine into a holding tank. This funnel is nicknamed “Mr. Thirsty” and can be used while the astronaut is sitting, standing or even floating around. Bringing water into space is expensive, so the International space station is building a system to purify and reuse water and pee – and not just human pee. Many animal experiments are conducted in space, and NASA estimates that 72 rats pee about as much as one astronaut. Way to recycle! When the urine tank is full, the astronauts shoot the pee outside where the pee freezes into clouds of ice crystals that look like stars. Astronaut Wally Schirra like to call it “constellation urination” One time, pee froze to the spacecraft. Mission control was afraid that it would damage the ship, but nobody wanted to do a spacewalk to fix it – they didn’t want to be known as the astronaut who “chipped pee off the shuttle”. They ended up using the robotic arm instead to do the dirty work.
Pooping in Space For pooping in space, the astronauts use a space toilet with the same type of suction to move the poop into its own tank, separate from the pee. NASA wants rats to fly in space without their turds flying around the shuttle. During missions, steady streams of air flow through the rat cages. The airflow pushes the poop and pee into waste trays and keeps it there until the end of the flight. Pooping into a space toilet is complicated. Astronauts must swing bars across their legs to stay put. Why? Gravity is one scientific law to worry about in space, and Newton’s third law is another. It says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When astronauts use their muscles to poop, the create a downward push. The equal and opposite reaction? Without being held down, the astronauts would shoot up, up and away!! Poop might even power our trips to other planets! NASA is studying how to burn food scraps, space garbage, and astronaut poop (along with regular fuel) to power a spaceship to Mars.
Animals and their Poop Let’s learn about SCAT-another name for animal droppings. Other names include dung, deer fewmets, cattle tath, otter spraints, cow flops or pats, buffalo bodewash, and bat guano. • Meat eating animals(carnivores) – such as tigers, lions and foxes – have feces that usually look very different from plant eaters. Their poop contains hair, fur, feathers and bones – in fact any bits of the animals that they have eaten. These bits tend to bind the poop together, making it long and untidy. • Meat is a rich source of nourishment that’s easy to digest with very little waste. Carnivores don’t poop very often. • Owl pellets – look for the bones Plant eaters (herbivores) eat almost all the time just to stay alive. Plants are a lot less nourishing and difficult to digest, with lots of parts that are thrown away in feces. Since they always keep eating, they pretty much never stop pooping too!
Sloppy or Ploppy? Another reason that poop comes in different shapes is the water content. • Vampire bats obviously feed on blood (not usually human) and blood is mostly water. So they get rid of the water by producing feces like runny jam. • Camels are famous for their ability to go without water. The result, very dry poop. • A cow produces about ten big sloppy pats, or cowpies every day. But a sheep eating the same grass only produces hundreds of little round droppings like raisins. The reason for the difference? Sheep hardly ever drink. They get water from the plants they eat, so by the time the grass has become poop, it’s pretty dry and breaks into little pieces. But cows love to drink and they don’t need to take moisture from the grass that they eat, so their poop can be like thick soup!
The Color of Poop One thing that doesn’t change very much about poop is the color. Most of the time it is brownish or blackish. Reasons poop is the same color for many animals: 1. When you mix lots of different colors from different types of food, it is like mixing the colors on a pallet of paint – you get a dark, yucky color. 2. When a body digest food, it breaks down some of the colors it contained, leaving it dull and grayish. When this is added to the dark brown remains of dead blood cells, - voilá – you get that old familiar brown. 3. Bird feces are usually a typical dark yucky color, too. But their droppings are splotched with white because their white and pasty urine leaves their body through the same hole as their poop. • • • Food coloring: When some animals eat a lot of brightly colored food, the color can get through to the poop. (Remember the beets from before? ) Birds feasting on berries in autumn can have a droppings that look like peppermint candy – pink or mauve from the berries and striped with white! When blue whales feed on pink shrimp, they swallow a ton in a single mouthful, they do huge pink poop that looks like giant blobs of strawberry ice cream breaking up in the water.
Poop as a Treasure? Dung Beetles - love their poop! There are three types of dung beetles: rollers, tunnelers, and dwellers. Those words describe how these beetles use the dung they find. When an animal such as an elephant chews, swallows, and digests, there always parts of its meal that pass through undigested. Those undigested bits pass out of the animal in its dung—and that is what provides food for dung beetles. The rollers shape pieces of dung into balls and roll them away from the pile. They bury their ball to either munch on later or to use as a place to lay their eggs. Tunnelers bury their dung treasure by tunneling underneath the pile. Dwellers actually live inside dung piles. Dung beetle larvae, or young, eat the solid dung while adult dung beetles stick to liquids. There is a good bit of nutritious moisture in dung, and adult beetles suck up that juice Rabbits eat plants that are very hard to digest, so many of the nutrients get pooped out. A rabbit will eat its own poop to get a second chance of nourishment from its own poop!
Lobster Anyone? Male lobsters face each other when they decide who rules the ocean floor. Crunching claws are only part of the scuffle. Lobster’ bladders are in their HEADS, and when they fight, they squirt each other in the face with pee. The loser remembers the smell of his opponent’s urine. If they meet up again within a week, just a whiff of that pee tells the losing lobster to back down before he begins. When a female lobster is interested in love, she will make the first move. She will march over and pee in the male lobster’s den, delivering a chemical “love letter” to let the male lobster know “I’m interested!” Hungry Hippo? Male hippos spend a lot of time patrolling their stretch of the Nile River. Sometimes they meet up and have a border war. The hippos turn so they are butt to butt. They cover each other with a pee-and-poop combination, twirling their tails like propellers to get plenty at nose level. Then they move on, happy to have fought the battle.
No Pee on Me, Thanks! After a little nose rubbing with his lady friend, a male porcupine douses her with his “perfume” (urine) – he pees all over her! It’s an unusual way to be romantic, but if you are a porcupine, hugging is not an option! The Siberian chipmunk uses someone else pee to send a message – a misleading one. These chipmunks douse themselves with snake pee when ever they can. Smelling like a snake (and not a tasty chipmunk) can keep other predators away! The Billy Goat makes sure no one with a nose could miss him. He URINATES on his belly and chest, even his BEARD. He enjoys the smell of his pee perfume and also hopes the females around will too!
How Much Poop? ? Rabbits produce an impressive 500 pellets a day. Each ball is pretty small, but so is a rabbit. (←Pygmy rabbit and its poop) While bears are hibernating, they don’t poop at all. Their bodies create an internal plug made from feces, old cells, and hair that keeps them from pooping during their winter sleep. A goose is a living poop factory. Geese poop on average every 12 minutes! A horse can lift its tail and unload ten pounds’ worth at a time – often without taking a step! Scientists recently found a chunk of fossilized TRex dung that weighted a whopping 16 lbs!. By studying this 17” 65 million year old piece of paleo-plop, they learned that TRex wasn’t a careful eater. It barely chewed cow-sized dinosaurs enough to crush their bones before swallowing.
Latrines – Animal toilets (and more. . ) Golden moles from southern Africa stay underground all the time because they are just about snack-size as far as bird of prey or a jackal is concerned. But the moles don’t want to have feces all over their homes, so they keep one little chamber in their large burrows just for pooping in. Giant otters, which live in big family groups in the rivers of South America, have giant latrines, and making an using them is a family affair. All the otters in the group trample an area of the riverbank bigger than a pool table. When the area is flat, the otters poop all over it. The smell is overpowering and the flattened plants on the bank can be seen from far up and down the river. The latrine isn’t jus a toilet – it’s a great big message for any new otter in town. “This is our river, and there are so many of us that we’ve done all this poop. So you better get lost!!”
Latrines – …continued… Sloths have perhaps the most extreme toilet-using habits of any animal. They do it very slowly – they digest heir food ten times more slowly than a cow. Once a week, sloths (who live solitary lives in treetops) climb down to the ground to poop. They make their own private latrine at the base of their tree and make the most of their trip. They can poop out two pounds of waste in a single session – over ¼ of what they weigh. These piles can be very huge and smelly. Since they don’t see much of one another, checking out the poop is a way to keep in touch. Naked mole rats (which have been described as looking like hotdogs left in the microwave too long) live in eastern Africa is huge mazelike underground towns. Their special toilet chambers aren’t designed simply to keep the rest of their burrows clean. Mole-rats regularly go in there to roll in their own poop. Strange taste in perfume? Not really. Mole-rat colonies have up to 300 members. The smell of their group’s poop helps them distinguish between family and foe if a fight breaks out with another colony. When wolverines are done feeding on a dead animal, they save the rest for later by pooping all over it. What’s the message? “This is mine, don’t touch!” After that, who would want to? ? ?
Useful Poop • This lovely beach is made of parrot fish poop. Parrot fish eat the algae that grow on coral rock, scientifically known as calcium carbonate. Naturally, a lot of this calcium carbonate gets into the digestive system of the fish. The fish can’t digest it, so they poop the calcium carbonate out as they swim. This poop end up as sand, which washes up on shore. So the next time that you take a walk on a tropical coral beach, thank the parrot fish for pooping out all the beautiful sand for you • • Ancient Romans used pigeon poop to bleach their hair. Many expert gardeners use Zoo. Doo which is considered the world’ best fertilizer and is made from elephant and rhino dung. Termites mix their poop with chewedup wood to build the huge towers they live in. An African tribe called the Massai mix cow poop with ashes to make the walls of their huts. Luckily, the poop (once it has dried) doesn’t smell at all.
• Special Delivery • • Many animals eat fruits and berries and the plant seeds inside them. The seeds are carried from the plant that was eaten and digested by these animals to their feces and pooped out in a new place where they can sprout and grow – which is exactly what the plant wants. In tropical regions, after bats have feasted on fruits, they don’t stop to poop, but often do it while flying over clearings in the forest. This makes them perfect seed deliverers as they take seeds to areas where there are no plants to compete with. Thanks to bat poop, areas that are completely bare of plants can be covered in thriving young shrubs and trees in just a couple of years. In northern climates, birds spread seeds in the same way. Mistletoe is the most clever plant of all at getting birds – and their poop – to work for it. The white mistletoe berries that we use to decorate our homes are a favorite of birds like blackbirds and robins. They eat the berries, but the seeds of the mistletoe that come out in their droppings are very sticky and cling uncomfortably to the birds’ bottoms. The only way a bird can get rid of them is to wipe its bottom vigorously on a rough piece of bark or a crack in a branch. This is exactly what the plant needs and the bird has - without knowing it- planted the seeds in the best place for them to survive!
Poop as Fuel? • Pioneers on the prairie didn’t have trees or coal to burn as fuel. So settlers burned dried buffalo chips to keep their houses warm. • In rural India, they use “cow chips. ” Fresh cow manure is patted into round discs and stuck on walls to dry. As soon as it has dried enough to fall off the wall, it’s ready to burn. India burns one quarter of all the dung its cows produce. That’s fuel for 330 million people! • When poop breaks down without any oxygen around, part of it turns to gas. One out of every ten people on Earth burns this poop-gas, or biogas, as fuel. In the country of Nepal, the poop-gas from two cows provides enough cooking fuel for a family of six!
Crazy Animal Poop Facts Sharks produce spiral poop If food is scarce, young cockroaches can survive by eating their parents poop. Mayflies don’t poop at all – they only live for one day, so they don’t need to ever poop! The smallest poop is from a bumblebee bat. This bat weighs less than 1/10 of an ounce and does droppings the size of a pinhead Beaver poop often floats because is contains so much undigested wood. The biggest poop is from the blue whale – about 10” wide and several yards long. The horses towing carts around Chinese cities must wear “butt bags” to keep the streets clean. When they are upset, chimps who have been taught sign language indicate their frustration by making the sign for poop.
Other Crazy Poop Facts • There are many new toilet inventions. There is an ejection seat that helps older people who can’t stand back up without help. Also one named “the Peacekeeper” which will only flush if the seat is placed back down. There is a Japanese toilet called a “smart toilet” which takes your blood pressure and temperature and sends the info to you doctor’s office. There also toilets that will wash your backside (called bidets) and some that even have blow dry features!! Companies used to test That model is very expensive, but their diapers by using does save on toilet paper! mashed potatoes or peanut butter as a substitute Many cultures used to try to get rid of freckles by rubbing dung on them Rather than using real poop to test toilets, manufacturers use brown, fermented beancurd. It looks – and can clog – just like the real thing During the American Revolution, English people jokingly hung portraits of George Washington in their bathrooms, since fear is supposed to help you poop Native American Lakota used Artist Michelangelo the ashes from burned poop bathed some of his statues in donkey dung to as toothpaste. Romans used urine a a mouthwash and make them look older tooth cleaner.
Gotta Go Gotta Get Urine Facts Cat urine glows under blacklight. One Survey revealed that 67% of people have peed in swimming pools or at least that is the amount that admit it. A pee powered battery has been developed. It’s not ready to run a laptop, but it can generate enough electricity to power a small emergency cell phone. Survey shows that 42 % of people fold their toilet paper and 33% crumple it. The rest of the people do both or wrap it around their hand. Long ago, alchemists tried to find gold in pee. They thought this metal was responsible for pee’s yellow color. India’s former prime minister Morarji Desai lived to be ninety nine years old. He said he owed his good health to drinking a pint of his own urine each day. When tested, toilet seats had the lowest bacteria levels of 12 surfaces including kitchen tables, telephones and computer keyboards Roman spies used pee as invisile ink to write secrets between the lines of their official documents. The messages only appeared when heated. That is where the expression “ read between the lines” came from. The Greek philosopher Aristotle tried to cure his baldness by rubbing his head with goat urine
References • • • Poop – A natural history of the unmentionable by Nicola Davies Gee Whiz – It’s all about pee by Susan E Goodman The truth about poop by Susan E Goodman Tracks, Scats, and Signs by Leslie Dendy Exploratopia by Pat Murphy Other interesting books: You Burp – The most interesting book you’ll ever read about eating by Diane Swanson Cows sweat through their noses by Barbara Seuling Don’t touch that – The book of gross, poisonous, and downright icky plants and critters by Jeff Day Its disgusting and we ate it by James Solheim
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