"It would be a cool method to apply to the manufacturing process"

November 19, 2018 10:03 AM

Of all the many mysteries that surround the common wombat, it is hard to find one as baffling as its ability – broadly acknowledged as unique in the natural world – to produce faeces shaped like cubes. The Guardian's science editor discusses a recent, er, breakthrough in determining how it occurs. (Wombats previously; wombat poop previously)
posted by Johnny Wallflower (33 comments total)

Wombats: truly the Brint Moltkes of the Diprotodontia.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:07 AM on November 19, 2018

I would have done slightly better on the Learned League Everybody Poops one-day challenge (questions down the right side) if only I'd remembered this.
posted by rewil at 10:15 AM on November 19, 2018

Your latest theme is both baffling and informative! Kudos!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:16 AM on November 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

I figure their reviewers must have shat bricks.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 10:18 AM on November 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Someone tell Mojang!
posted by carter at 10:35 AM on November 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yang believes that the revelation will have implications beyond the small community of researchers who admit an interest in wombat scat. Today, engineers have only two methods for making cubes: either moulding them or cutting them, she points out. The wombat’s intestines suggest a third route is possible. “It would be a cool method to apply to the manufacturing process,” she said.

Hang on. Did I invent a novel, potentially worldchanging engineering process in kindergarten when I took a sphere of play-doh and squooshed it into a cube?
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:37 AM on November 19, 2018

I love the cute picture of the wombat in the article: amiable, but oddly knowing. "So... you think your party trick is impressive? C'mere."
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:52 AM on November 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Did I invent a novel, potentially worldchanging engineering process in kindergarten when I took a sphere of play-doh and squooshed it into a cube?

That depends. Did you do it using only your butt?
posted by The Bellman at 10:52 AM on November 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

Little known fact that Wombats invented dice and dice gambling. Hence the name 'craps'.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:55 AM on November 19, 2018 [12 favorites]

This has Ig Nobel written all over it.
posted by The Nutmeg of Consolation at 10:56 AM on November 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I read this story last night and it inspired me to compose this verse, or wombatterel:

Wombat poo is cubic poo
Pooing in cubes isn't easy to do
It's nice and round inside their tum
But turns right-angled in their bum
And so this cuddly species
Has rectilinear faeces
O wombat poo's absurd
Cause it's a geometric turd

This marsupial may look stolid
But it can crap a Platonic solid
A wombat has few tricks
But the best one's shitting bricks
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:58 AM on November 19, 2018 [38 favorites]

Excellent! But I would have gone with "d6" as the final rhyme.
posted by The Bellman at 11:05 AM on November 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

Sample had some fun with this:
they can pass up to 100 per night, presumably with some trepidation...

By emptying the intestines and inflating them with long modelling balloons, of the sort used to make balloon animals at children’s parties...
posted by doctornemo at 11:32 AM on November 19, 2018

But quite how the animals produce the awkward-shaped blocks – and they can pass up to 100 per night, presumably with some trepidation – has proved a harder one to work out.

I see what you did there....
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:33 AM on November 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

All about wombutts. (also, one of my favorite new podcasts of 2018)
posted by panama joe at 11:48 AM on November 19, 2018

Step 1) Have three square meals a day.
Step 2) Have 3 times more.
Step 3) ...
Step 4) Profit!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:24 PM on November 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Poo-r-squared
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 12:25 PM on November 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

As the gift giving season approaches, be aware that wombats are herbivores, and so paper made of their droppings is available, for those people you know who would enjoy (or not) receiivng holiday cards made of these cubes.
posted by ocschwar at 1:14 PM on November 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Your latest theme is both baffling and informative! Kudos!

NumberTwoNovember
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:36 PM on November 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I really feel I should have a pithy comment about this.
posted by Combat Wombat at 3:53 PM on November 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

... but nobody has ever asked the wombats why they're doing this. Maybe, in their minds, they're rolling saving throws for the universe.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:15 PM on November 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow, Joe. I'm totally going to try to turn "wombat" into slang for tabletop gamer now.
posted by ocschwar at 7:07 PM on November 19, 2018

This reminds me that I was once at a conference in Queensland where we international visitors were treated to a sort of indigenous Australian mammal petting zoo, and I got to hold a wombat. Its fur was weirdly coarse, and holy shit it was WAY heavier than it looked. They are hefty little buggers, wombats.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:55 PM on November 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

i_am_joe’s_spleen, that’s because they’re built for digging and also have armoured butt plates. They’re very dense! As I understand it, If a wombat is attacked by a predator, it will retreat into its burrow and turn its back on its attacker. The bony plate of the wombat’s pelvis prevents the predator getting a grip. They can also smash the predators skull against the roof of the burrow using their super-butt.

Wombats are awesome.
posted by prismatic7 at 3:18 AM on November 20, 2018 [8 favorites]

prismatic7, your butt plate link is wrong. Don't leave me hanging!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:03 AM on November 20, 2018

Johnny Wallflower, check this out.
posted by twilightlost at 8:39 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

The cubist movement from down under.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:09 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm fond of this quote from a radio interview with Patricia Yang:

"I studied feces for two or three years and I know most of the categories," Yang, a Georgia Institute of Technology mechanical engineer who specializes in bodily fluids, told As It Happens host Carol Off.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:11 AM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yang really knows her shit.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:26 AM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

"In a new study, Yang and her colleagues have had a fresh crack at the problem."

This article. Every paragraph is gold.
posted by Mogur at 11:52 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm not much of a "cute" person, but wombats are darned cute.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:38 PM on November 20, 2018

In other wombutt news: Female wombats bite their partner's butt during foreplay
posted by homunculus at 10:17 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

it alluded to this in that article, but perhaps the butt biting is the female's way of testing how tough the male's rump is, since they use it to fend off predators.

"oh don't mind me, i'm just checking if your rump is tough enough to defend our potential children"
posted by numaner at 10:41 AM on November 28, 2018 [1 favorite]