Pod Insights This Podcast Will Kill You Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made About this episode It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind as we delve into the rich world of poop. This episode, the first of a two-part miniseries on poop, features a wide cast of characters all with some role in the production or management of poo, like our intestinal tract with its sphincters and microbiota, dung beetles that perform the duties so crucial for ecosystem function, and the sperm whale that produces a revered substance used in perfumes. We’re going behind the scenes to understand how the sausage really gets made (in a manner of speaking) and why we need a big perspective shift to stop seeing poop as waste and start seeing it as a resource.
Correction: EW says that elephants poop 15 pounds a day, but in reality it’s more like 10x that - 150-200 pounds! Sorry for the mistake - we noticed it while listening through.
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Transcript 13,724 words · 9 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 This is exactly right.
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1:03 Speaker 02 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:35 Speaker 03 Hello. My story about poop is an embarrassing one, and one I am comfortable to share, but one that is embarrassing. And like a lot of embarrassing stories, it happened when I was much younger. I was in fifth grade at my first experience of staying... Away from my parents with my school class. It was at an outdoor ed adventure in the woods where you do ropes courses and team building exercises and you stay in a cabin. I remember being excited for it. I remember having good friends in elementary school. And I remember the first day going rather well where we were in the woods playing outside. The first night was a large like sort of cafeteria style lunch where we had, I don't
2:20 Speaker 03 remember what the food was, but I sat with my friends. Everything was rather normal. And then we took a long walk to, there was a planetarium attached to this outdoor ed facility. And we were going to see a late night, probably like eight or nine o'clock planetarium show. And I remember walking with my friends, talking and my memory is a little fuzzy at this point, possibly for reasons to protect myself, but at a certain point during this walk, I think I attempted to fart and poop came out. And then poop continued to come out. And at a certain point, I don't know what happened in my brain, but I was okay with
3:02 Speaker 03 continuing to let poop come out because there was really nothing I could do. I was committed to going to the planetarium. I was committed to seeing this through and I truly didn't know what else to do. And I'd already done the poop and I thought it was done. So every time a new wave of having to go to the bathroom came to me, I let it happen. And I remember walking with a lot of poop in my pants. My pants were jeans. They were like tough denim jeans and the poop was like, I would describe it as like toothpasting down my leg. It was really horrible.
3:47 Speaker 03 But again, I wasn't like super disturbed by it. In the moment we went to the planetarium, I sat next to my friends. I- Promise, I think I continued pooping. I remember people smelling it. I remember successfully just saying it wasn't me and saying that I smelled it too. And then I remember walking back to our cabin, immediately going to the shower, taking off my pants in the shower, attempting to clean my pants so that I could put them, you know, in a bag that I could take home with myself. I remember that shower being possibly, at least up until that point, the greatest shower of my entire life.
4:31 Speaker 03 And that is the end of the story. I did poop myself again the next day. It wasn't as obscene or abundant, but it happened again. And I don't know if it was nerves, if it was something about the diet, but that is my poop story and I am not proud of it. I think my life would be very different had my friends found out. And most of them still don't know. But anyway, that's my story.
5:44 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for being willing to share that.
5:49 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Erin Welsh.
5:51 Speaker 01 And I'm Erin Allman Updike.
5:52 Speaker 04 And this is This Podcast Will Kill You.
5:54 Speaker 01 Welcome to poop.
5:56 Speaker 04 Poop.
5:57 Speaker 01 Poop. Poop.
5:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:59 Speaker 01 Part one.
6:00 Speaker 04 I think we decided to do an episode, or two episodes about poop, without really knowing what they were going to be about. And we're just like, poop, that sounds like something we would talk about.
6:09 Speaker 01 Like, on, on, for, on end, just like, continue to talk about.
6:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:14 Speaker 04 But we are going to, we eventually were like, okay, I guess we'll have to come up with topics.
6:20 Speaker 01 Right.
6:20 Speaker 04 Specific to poop. What do people want to know about poop? And, yeah.
6:25 Speaker 01 And so here we are now.
6:26 Speaker 04 So here we are. So this episode, we're going to be talking about what is in poop.
6:31 Speaker 01 Right.
6:32 Speaker 04 How we make poop. And I'm going to go into a little bit of like poop in the animal kingdom.
6:37 Speaker 01 I am so excited. And not just like how animals poop, but like all of the ways in which we can use poop.
6:44 Speaker 04 Yes.
6:45 Speaker 01 I'm excited.
6:45 Speaker 04 Poop is a resource, is how I had originally titled this. And the second episode was just like, poop is gross.
6:51 Speaker 01 Poop is gross.
6:52 Speaker 04 Yeah. So, and next week, we're going to go into, yeah, more of poop is gross. And then what happens when you can't poop the way that you should poop?
7:01 Speaker 01 That's what I'll talk about.
7:02 Speaker 04 And I'll talk about like toilets, the history of sanitation, just how disgusting ancient Rome really was.
7:09 Speaker 01 I cannot tell you how excited I am to hear about how disgusting ancient Rome was.
7:15 Speaker 04 Well, I want to hear more about fiber and peristalsis.
7:17 Speaker 01 I'll tell you about it. I'm not going to tell you that much about peristalsis.
7:20 Speaker 04 I just like the word, Erin.
7:21 Speaker 01 It's a great word.
7:22 Speaker 04 Just wanted to be able to say it.
7:23 Speaker 01 We'll say it multiple times.
7:25 Speaker 04 Oh, poop quarantine-y time.
7:28 Speaker 01 We have that, actually.
7:29 Speaker 04 We do have that. Completely forgot. It's been a while since we've like, recorded, recorded.
7:34 Speaker 01 It's been a minute.
7:36 Speaker 04 What are we drinking this week?
7:38 Speaker 01 We're drinking drink number two.
7:40 Speaker 04 Drink number two.
7:43 Speaker 01 Of all the ways that you can say poop, we found that one to be the most charming.
7:47 Speaker 04 I really do. I really do like it.
7:49 Speaker 01 It's good.
7:49 Speaker 04 It's a good one.
7:50 Speaker 01 It's also a delicious drink.
7:51 Speaker 04 It is. What is in poop? Oh, sorry. What is in drink number two, not poop number two?
7:56 Speaker 01 I'll tell you that later. But what's in drink number two is basically like a mint chocolate martini situation. So there's vodka, there's creme de cacao or something similar to that.
8:07 Speaker 04 Chocolate liqueur.
8:08 Speaker 01 Chocolate liqueur.
8:09 Speaker 04 Peppermint schnapps.
8:11 Speaker 01 You can tell I don't make the drinks.
8:13 Speaker 04 Some chocolate syrup, you know, it's gonna be delicious.
8:16 Speaker 01 All right.
8:17 Speaker 04 Done. We'll post that on social media.
8:20 Speaker 01 We will.
8:20 Speaker 04 At least.
8:21 Speaker 01 At least.
8:21 Speaker 04 Possibly website if we can get around to it.
8:24 Speaker 01 We're still working on that, honestly. It's been a struggle.
8:26 Speaker 04 You know, it's fine.
8:28 Speaker 01 You just have to follow us on socials.
8:29 Speaker 04 Yes, please do.
8:30 Speaker 01 And then you'll see it there.
8:31 Speaker 04 And also on YouTube.
8:34 Speaker 01 On YouTube because we're here in the Exactly Right Studio.
8:37 Speaker 04 We are.
8:40 Speaker 04 It's really fun to be here again. And if you would like to experience some of that joy with us, please go to youtube.com, the Exactly Right Media channel and you'll find us.
8:50 Speaker 01 And we're there. This whole season has been on YouTube.
8:53 Speaker 04 It has been.
8:54 Speaker 01 So it's been quite exciting.
8:55 Speaker 04 With some occasional really fun videos and pictures.
8:58 Speaker 01 We have a couple for you today.
9:00 Speaker 04 We do.
9:00 Speaker 01 All right, with some props.
9:02 Speaker 04 With some props.
9:03 Speaker 01 Also, business last piece, we swear, we're almost done here.
9:07 Speaker 04 Website, yeah.
9:07 Speaker 01 We do have a website.
9:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's true.
9:10 Speaker 01 It's called thispodcastwithkelly.com. We have a lot of things there. You can find all of the sources from this episode and all of our episodes. You can find links to our bookshop.org affiliate account and our Goodreads list and
9:20 Speaker 04 Merch.
9:21 Speaker 01 Merch. Ooh, merch. You can also find
9:25 Speaker 04 Transcripts.
9:25 Speaker 01 Transcripts, yep. And Bloodmobile, who does all of our music.
9:28 Speaker 04 Yep, firsthand account form.
9:30 Speaker 01 Firsthand account form.
9:31 Speaker 04 Contact us form.
9:32 Speaker 01 There's a lot there.
9:33 Speaker 04 There's lots.
9:33 Speaker 01 Check it out.
9:34 Speaker 04 Okay, are we finally ready for number two?
9:41 Speaker 01 I think so, Erin. Okay. Okay. We'll take a break and get started.
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11:39 Speaker 01 Poop? Sorry, it's every time I say the word poop, it makes me laugh still. I know, I know. Poop is the non-digestible parts of our food. Yes. Mixed up with a bunch of digestive juices, mucus, left-off cells from our GI tract, and of course, tons of bacteria, both living and dead. What is it, what do you mean by tons? Oh, I'll tell you. Okay. Just you wait.
12:03 Speaker 01 So I thought that for the start of this episode, and this series really, where we're going to be talking so much about poop, it feels important and also fun for me to go through the process of digestion and learn how we make a poop together. How we make a poop together. Learn together how we make a poop. Okay. I prefer that. Yes.
12:27 Speaker 01 Ms. Frizzle did this on a lovely journey through Arthur's digestive tract. I still remember this. Same. So we're basically going to take Ms. Frizzle's journey. Love this. Through our own digestive tract. Great. Along this journey, we might mention a lot of places where things could go wrong. I'm not going to get super into detail on the things that could go wrong right now, but if you have questions, I know you'll ask them. You know I will. No qualms about that. No.
12:53 Speaker 01 But mostly, I'm going to be talking about like the process of digestion, how we make a poop, so that we know really what is in our poop. And then next week is when we'll talk more about how things can go wrong with digestion and poop. Poop problems. Manufacturing. Poop manufacturing.
13:08 Speaker 01 LTD.
13:12 Speaker 01 So digestion starts in our mouth as soon as we put a bite of food into our mouth. We've got amylases and other enzymes in our saliva that start the process of breaking down the like complex starches in, that's in our food. And of course, our teeth are grinding and breaking things down into teeny tiny pieces. As we swallow, that food matter will pass through our esophagus, aided by these muscular contractions that you love so much that we call peristalsis. Peristalsis. As well as aided by all of that saliva that we mixed our food up with. And then our esophagus has to travel all the way like from our mouth, basically, down through a hole in our diaphragm, which is that muscle that separates our chest from
13:57 Speaker 01 our abdomen. Mm hmm. Through a hole in that diaphragm and then through a sphincter called the lower esophageal sphincter. Sphincters are a recurring theme. Oh, yeah, they are. They are essential. Exactly. Yeah. Very much so. And our food bolus, which is what it's called at this point, will land with a splash, I like to imagine, in the digestive acids of our stomach. Okay, so it's like a sea of acids. A little sea. It's probably not realistically, but it's the way I like to imagine it. Okay, okay. And our stomach is up in the upper left hand side of our belly. Got it. Okay. And there in our stomach, it will churn, literally with muscular contractions, and
14:40 Speaker 01 burn, literally with hydrochloric acid, as well as other enzymes that our stomach makes, like pepsin and other things, to further break down our food and create this kind of like liquidy mushy mass that's called chyme. Chyme. Chyme. And our stomach then lets that chyme out a little bit at a time through yet another sphincter called the pyloric sphincter. How little at a time? What do you, what do you mean? It's a great question. So the amount of time, how little, it kind of depends on what it is that you're eating. So liquids are gonna- Like a donut that we just ate. Like we just ate. It usually takes, half of our food will be emptied from our stomach in about an hour or so. Wow, okay.
15:23 Speaker 01 And then the rest of it, it can really just depend on like how much fat was in it, how well we chewed it, because bigger pieces that are larger than like two millimeters cannot pass through that sphincter, so they have to be broken down further- They've got a slosh more. -before they can pass through. And all of that just happens in our, in our stomach. So it's doing all of that. But usually between two and four hours, your stomach is completely empty after a meal.
15:46 Speaker 04 Two and four hours. And fat, more fat means longer time digesting.
15:49 Speaker 01 Exactly. Yes, because it kind of sits on top because it floats. And so then it like whatever it takes longer for it to kind of end up passing through that sphincter.
15:57 Speaker 04 Right.
15:58 Speaker 01 And in that way, our stomach is a really important regulator of our digestion. Right? Because it is slowly letting food, or chyme rather, out of our stomach into our small intestine at a rate ideally that our small intestine can actually handle it. If it just dumped all of the contents at once, that would be miserable and you would feel really sick from it. Cause your small intestine, I feel like really doesn't get enough credit in our GI tract.
16:27 Speaker 04 It's so huge.
16:28 Speaker 01 It's huge.
16:29 Speaker 04 It's not, it's not aptly named.
16:31 Speaker 01 No.
16:32 Speaker 04 It is the long intestine.
16:33 Speaker 01 It is the long intestine. It is small in diameter and that's why it's called the small intestine. But yes, it is also the place where we are doing all, almost, of the absorption of our nutrients. Like you could take out someone's entire stomach. You could take out someone's entire colon. You really cannot take out their whole small intestine.
16:54 Speaker 04 But you can take out like chunks of it?
16:56 Speaker 01 Even taking out small chunks of it can have pretty significant effects. And it ends up with what we called short gut syndrome, which can have quite a lot of side effects. So anyways, I just feel like small intestine doesn't get enough cred.
17:06 Speaker 04 How long is the small intestine?
17:08 Speaker 01 Great question. Anywhere from, let me check my notes, because that's later. Three to five meters, which is like nine to 16 plus feet.
17:18 Speaker 04 I mean, it's just all coiled up in there.
17:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. I want everyone to know that I tried really hard to make like a large diagram.
17:26 Speaker 04 Did you make it to scale? Like you were gonna have like nine to 15 feet?
17:29 Speaker 01 It was like the size of my child.
17:31 Speaker 04 Okay, well, your child's not nine feet.
17:33 Speaker 01 No, no, no. Well, neither are we, but it was coiled.
17:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. Oh, oh, I see. I just mean like, no.
17:39 Speaker 01 Anyways, but I didn't. So I have no visuals right now, except my hands. Okay.
17:45 Speaker 01 Where are we, Erin? We've gotten way off course. We started giving credit to the small intestine. So that's where all of our food that our stomach lets out makes it. And in addition to all of the absorption, which is happening in our small intestine, our small intestine is also a place of continued digestion. So our gallbladder, which everyone is an expert on now because we did an episode on gallbladder, as well as our pancreas are both secreting additional digestive enzymes into our small intestine. They let them out in the first part of our small intestine. And that like finalizes the process of digestion essentially, for the most part. So things are digested? So things are all the way broken down because they have to be broken down all the way into like their singular components, right?
18:28 Speaker 01 All of our starches and carbohydrates from things like bread have to be broken down into single sugars. Our proteins have to be broken down into single amino acids. Fats have to be broken down into fatty acids so that in our small intestine, they can be absorbed through that intestinal wall and into our bloodstream so that we can actually use these things. So it's like digestion, extraction, excretion. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, except the colon does more than excretion. We'll get there in just one second. So yeah, so that's our small intestine and what it's doing the whole way down. There's like three different parts that have different names and each of them absorb different things. Don't ask me any specifics. Most all of everything is absorbed within the first two thirds.
19:13 Speaker 01 So that's our duodenum and jejunum, the first parts of our small intestine. And then the last part is called the ileum. And there, even though most things have been absorbed by then, a few things are very important to be absorbed only in that spot, like B12, as well as our bile salts. Throwback to our gallbladder episode. Interesting. Why? It's so specialized. Each part of our system has a purpose. And then at the end of this 16-ish feet journey, there's yet another sphincter, the ileocecal valve.
19:48 Speaker 04 Okay, I just have to say that all of my, all of my favorite words apparently are digestive.
19:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, sphincter, peristalsis, duodenum.
19:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, not sphincter, it was the ileocecal.
19:59 Speaker 01 Oh, ileocecal.
20:00 Speaker 04 I mean, sphincter's fine.
20:02 Speaker 01 I love sphincter.
20:02 Speaker 04 I would put it up there, but not like, it's not, it's nowhere near duodenum.
20:06 Speaker 01 Okay, it's a good word.
20:07 Speaker 04 Or jejuneum, yeah.
20:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, these are good words. So at this ileocecal valve is what separates the small intestine from our large intestine, which is also called our colon. And our colon, it, it kind of is the star of the show when it comes to poop, because this is where this mushy mass of chyme and digested food bits that are left over turns into poop. This happens in our colon.
20:33 Speaker 04 Okay.
20:33 Speaker 01 Our colon starts down in the right, lower right quadrant of our abdomen. It snakes up, that's called our ascending colon.
20:42 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
20:43 Speaker 01 Up towards our liver.
20:44 Speaker 04 Okay.
20:44 Speaker 01 It goes across the top of our belly and then it travels down to our lower left quadrant. And then it does a S curve.
20:53 Speaker 04 Okay, I like that.
20:54 Speaker 01 Sigmoid colon. Down and back to our rectum.
20:58 Speaker 04 Okay.
20:59 Speaker 01 And then it exits our anus.
21:02 Speaker 04 Yet another sphincter.
21:03 Speaker 01 Two sphincters, in fact.
21:05 Speaker 04 What?
21:05 Speaker 01 Yes. The large intestine is called the large intestine because it's much wider than our small intestine. So it's like, it's like five to eight centimeters instead of two to four centimeters, but it's not nearly as long. It's like five feet-ish, 150 centimeters or so long, a meter and a half. And the way that we go from this pure liquid chyme that's rushing through the water side of our small intestine and into the formed tubes that we think of as turds is because our colon is absorbing all of the water that is left over.
21:39 Speaker 04 Right.
21:40 Speaker 01 Our small intestine does a crap ton of water absorption as well. But our colon, that is the primary function of it. It's resorbing water and electrolytes, especially sodium, because the water follows the sodium.
21:54 Speaker 01 And that is like its main job. It's absorbing like one to two liters of water per day. It also has a ton of musculature around it. And so it is doing peristalsis to really mix all of those contents to make sure that any other things that didn't get absorbed, things that need further breakdown by the microbes that live in our colon, which do a really important role in breaking down the last bits of things.
22:21 Speaker 04 And I'm assuming that the our microbiome, our gut microbiome is very different from one start of the small intestine all the way to the
22:30 Speaker 01 End. End, absolutely. Yes. Every aspect of our GI tract has its own microflora.
22:38 Speaker 04 Love that.
22:39 Speaker 01 Yes. But yeah, that and then at the at the end of that, at the very bottom of this gastrointestinal tract, the last pieces, the rectum and the anus are really, really important. Now, the anal canal, it's only a couple of inches long. Super short, but it has in that two different sphincters. There's the internal sphincter and the external sphincter. Now, the internal anal sphincter is not really under voluntary control. So that's automatically opening and closing. And it does this when your rectum starts to fill with poop. Listen, we're going there.
23:15 Speaker 04 We're there.
23:16 Speaker 01 We're deep in it. As your rectum starts to fill with poop, this causes your internal anal sphincter to relax, to let a little bit of the contents of that rectum into the anal canal.
23:29 Speaker 04 Okay.
23:29 Speaker 01 Okay. Then there's sensors there. There's like a system where it talks back to your brain through the sensory system in your anal canal that can tell, is it a poop or is it a fart?
23:41 Speaker 04 But they can't, I mean, it can't always tell.
23:43 Speaker 01 You can't always tell.
23:44 Speaker 04 As we learned from our firsthand account.
23:46 Speaker 01 But you sometimes can. And so then you go and have control over that external anal sphincter. So that if it senses poop and you're in a place where you can let it out, then you relax that external anal sphincter and let it rip.
24:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. If you poop.
24:04 Speaker 01 Or you sense that there's poop and you're like, I'm not there yet. And so you can clench that external anal sphincter, which everyone's probably doing right now as they listen.
24:16 Speaker 01 Or you can sense that it's a fart and you're like, now's the time.
24:20 Speaker 04 Now's the time.
24:20 Speaker 01 Release. Okay?
24:22 Speaker 04 And hope you're right.
24:23 Speaker 01 And hope that you're right about it. And that is how we make poop.
24:27 Speaker 04 Amazing.
24:28 Speaker 01 Isn't it? I just really feel like that journey deserves credit.
24:32 Speaker 04 So there's more peristalsis, the, the large intestine or the colon is the, the star when it comes to peristalsis?
24:40 Speaker 01 Everything is peristalsising. Cause you need it to be able, for your food to even make it to your stomach to begin with. Your stomach has a lot of musculature and it's also contracting, but your colon just has like a, a different setup of muscles where they have these like transverse muscles that run along the whole colon as well as around.
24:59 Speaker 04 Okay.
25:00 Speaker 01 So they just do a little different types of contraction to really form those turds.
25:04 Speaker 04 I really want to ask questions about like, what, when does your stomach hurt? What is actually hurting? But I know that that's probably more next week.
25:11 Speaker 01 And it's so variable. But yes, we'll talk more about that next week.
25:15 Speaker 04 When you have gurgles, where is that happening?
25:17 Speaker 01 Oh, do you mean borberigme?
25:19 Speaker 04 What? There's a word for that. And yet another really good word.
25:22 Speaker 01 I know. It's really good. Borberigme is the tummy gurgles that you get, the gas bubbles.
25:27 Speaker 04 Okay. Why does it have a name?
25:29 Speaker 01 Cause it's so good.
25:32 Speaker 04 Where does that come from?
25:33 Speaker 01 I have no clue.
25:34 Speaker 04 Is it a person?
25:35 Speaker 01 These are questions for you, Erin.
25:36 Speaker 04 I know. I know. I literally, in, in the, one of the episodes, I have a whole thing on etymology. It might be.
25:41 Speaker 01 Is it this one?
25:42 Speaker 04 I think it is this one. It is. Yeah.
25:44 Speaker 01 Well, I don't have answers for those questions, but I do want to talk a little bit more about the poop that, that we have now formed. You asked at the beginning, like, how long does it take for us to just empty that stomach? And so that's, you know, again, anywhere from like one to four hours. But this whole process of forming a turd can take such a long time. It's anywhere from like 24 to 72 hours. We're talking like one to three days.
26:08 Speaker 04 Or if it's gum, it's five years.
26:14 Speaker 01 It's not.
26:15 Speaker 04 That was way too big of a laugh for that.
26:16 Speaker 01 Sorry, but I thought it was quite funny. Um, yeah, no. Yeah, but it's hugely variable, which I think is so fascinating because it's not just that it varies person to person, which it does, but it can also vary depending on what you're eating. So fiber.
26:33 Speaker 04 I was just about to say.
26:34 Speaker 01 Which we'll talk more about next week.
26:35 Speaker 04 Okay.
26:36 Speaker 01 Fiber can significantly increase transit times, meaning that things move quicker through your colon and through your small intestine as well.
26:43 Speaker 04 Okay, increased transit times as in like faster.
26:47 Speaker 01 Faster, faster move through. Yeah, yeah, yeah, less traffic.
26:49 Speaker 04 Okay, okay.
26:51 Speaker 01 Um, but anyway, the, the main timeframe is like between one to three days.
26:56 Speaker 04 One to three days. And what about other things that change transit time?
27:01 Speaker 01 Uh, fiber is the biggest one that has been studied, but there's also like, there's lots of medications that can slow down transit, big, huge GLP ones that everyone is on right now, the like Ozempics of the world. That's like, one of their main mechanisms is slowing down gastric emptying and so they slow your transit time, but lots of other medicines can too.
27:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, why do like opioids slow down transit time?
27:22 Speaker 01 Uh, I think because of something about the receptors that they're working on where there's also opioid receptors in your GI tract. But yeah, they can cause pretty substantial constipation. Um, the SSRIs also can affect your gut motility in general, not necessarily slowing it down, but sometimes, sometimes speeding it up, but just cause more, more berd me, just more movement there because of how much serotonin we have in our guts. Um, so there's a lot of different medicines that can do that. And there's also, in addition to a range in like, how long it takes you to make your poop, which might affect how often you poop, there's also a huge range in consistency of poops. And for that, we can talk about, one of my favorite things in all of medicine to talk
28:04 Speaker 01 about, which is the Bristol stool scale, or the Bristol formed stool scale. Uh, and I think we have an image of it, but you can Google it if you're just listening. It's called the Bristol stool chart. Um, and this was invented in 1990.
28:17 Speaker 04 Yeah. Which feels like it should have been invented in
28:20 Speaker 01 Much longer ago.
28:22 Speaker 04 10?
28:22 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. But it wasn't. It was within our lifetimes.
28:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:26 Speaker 01 Um, and they actually invented this, or they came up with this really as a way to correlate stool transit time.
28:34 Speaker 04 Okay.
28:35 Speaker 01 So it was like, the longer that your stool was taking to move through your guts, the harder your poops were going to be.
28:41 Speaker 04 Right.
28:41 Speaker 01 So a type 1 stool are described as separate hard lumps like nuts. So like your popping out pellets.
28:49 Speaker 04 Rabbit pellets.
28:50 Speaker 01 Oh. Like these rabbit pellets.
28:52 Speaker 04 Rabbit pellets.
28:52 Speaker 01 Which I have a shout out to the San Diego Natural History Museum for letting me borrow their poop.
28:58 Speaker 04 There, it's not real poop, just in case anyone is, is concerned.
29:01 Speaker 01 But it's really accurate fake poop. So yeah, like hard, hard rabbit pellets is like a type 1. And then a type 7 is just like pure liquid poop. Just like completely watery, no pieces type of poop. And an ideal poop is considered usually between 3 and 4, and sometimes a type 5.
29:20 Speaker 04 Why sometimes? Is that just like depending on the?
29:22 Speaker 01 Person dependent, really. Like what is normal for you might be different than what's normal for someone else.
29:27 Speaker 04 That's interesting in and of itself.
29:29 Speaker 01 I know, right? And also, this is a slightly different scale for kiddos who are very prone to constipation. But their scale is a little bit different, just to make it easier for kids, because they have a harder time describing their poop.
29:41 Speaker 04 Okay.
29:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:42 Speaker 04 Why, why do kids have, is it just they're not eating fiber?
29:45 Speaker 01 Um, I think it's more that they hold, uh, their poop, especially in toddlers.
29:50 Speaker 04 Okay.
29:51 Speaker 01 They'll be like volitional stool holding, it's called. And so they basically are like either afraid to poop in the potty, or it's like too big of a change for them, or they have one bad poop and now they're scared of it. There's like so many things that can go into it.
30:01 Speaker 04 Typically during like the potty training.
30:02 Speaker 01 Potty training, but then once consti-, we'll talk more about this next week, Erin.
30:06 Speaker 04 Okay, sorry.
30:08 Speaker 01 But once constipation starts, it's really hard. Like it's a, it's a vicious cycle.
30:11 Speaker 04 Oh.
30:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's a hard, it's a hard thing to break.
30:13 Speaker 04 God, I wanted to ask questions, I know.
30:15 Speaker 01 Next week. But that, I mean, that's like how we make poop. These are the ways that our poop can look.
30:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:21 Speaker 01 Really varied. Um, I don't know what other questions that you have about poop.
30:27 Speaker 04 Um, fiber. Talk to me about fiber. And, yeah.
30:32 Speaker 01 No.
30:35 Speaker 04 Excuse me.
30:36 Speaker 01 What do you want to know? I'm going to talk more next week about fiber.
30:38 Speaker 04 Okay, okay.
30:39 Speaker 01 What fiber does on like a general level?
30:42 Speaker 04 Sure.
30:42 Speaker 01 Is it holds on to water.
30:44 Speaker 04 It holds on to water.
30:45 Speaker 01 So fiber are parts of plant material that we cannot break down ourselves. Some parts of fiber, our gut bacteria can break down and they do so. And when they do, then they usually produce gas. And so that's why sometimes fiber can make you real bloated and gassy.
31:01 Speaker 04 Yep.
31:01 Speaker 01 Because your gut bacteria are so thrilled about it. But other times they don't really break it down. And then all it is, is this basically like large structure that holds on to water. And so because your colon is mostly just absorbing water, the more fiber that you have, the less water that you're absorbing from that.
31:19 Speaker 04 Okay.
31:19 Speaker 01 So the softer your stool stays. It also provides this like bulking agent, which then your colon can peristals against. And that is why it moves along as well, too.
31:30 Speaker 04 Okay.
31:31 Speaker 01 So that's basically fiber.
31:33 Speaker 04 I do have a question. I was thinking, so, okay. So you talked about that the poop is our undigested, or well, okay, the leftover foods.
31:43 Speaker 01 Leftovers. Yeah, yeah.
31:43 Speaker 04 Leftovers. And then it's also bacteria and some of our own gut microbes.
31:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:51 Speaker 04 How much of it is gut microbes? What about our intestinal shedding? You know what?
31:57 Speaker 01 I'm so glad that you asked. That's the last thing I wanted to tell you.
32:00 Speaker 04 Oh, my gosh.
32:00 Speaker 01 It's like we work so well together. So, because that gets into like, okay, I said that it's just the leftover parts. And now we know what our guts are doing the whole way down. But like, what really is our poop made out of? When you see a turd in the toilet, what is it really?
32:14 Speaker 04 Well, it's on the stool scale of something.
32:16 Speaker 01 On the stool scale. Seventy-five percent of our poop is just water.
32:21 Speaker 04 Seventy-five percent?
32:22 Speaker 01 On average. If we're talking like a Bristol three to five.
32:24 Speaker 04 Sure.
32:25 Speaker 01 Okay. The less, the more constipated, the harder the stool, the less water it's going to have. But so seventy-five percent or so of it is usually water. And the remaining twenty-five percent is like biomass. Up to 55% of that biomass is bacteria.
32:43 Speaker 04 Wow.
32:44 Speaker 01 And up to 50% of that bacteria are still alive of those bacteria. Sorry for my grammar. So we're talking like, I also didn't even mention this, but like in your, in your colon especially, because that's where we think about our gut microbiome the most. Because that's where we have the most abundant flora, even though we have microbes everywhere.
33:04 Speaker 04 Sure.
33:04 Speaker 01 We are talking hundreds of billions, if not trillions of individual bacteria from hundreds, if not thousands of different species. All of which are doing different things. They're serving different roles, including helping break down the final bits of food that weren't broken down by our digestive tract in our small intestine and our stomach, including making vitamin K and a number of B vitamins that are essential for us to then absorb in our colon. And playing a huge role in our immune system, protecting us from infection with other bacteria. And then also just like modulating our immune response. And the more that we learn about our gut microbiome, the more like of a role that we know that it has in like our total body health.
33:50 Speaker 01 So when we're pooping out, like half of the actual mass of our poop is just bacteria.
33:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:57 Speaker 01 Which is also-
33:58 Speaker 04 I can't get over that.
33:59 Speaker 01 And it's also why our poop is so gross, because half of that bacteria is alive and could make you sick if it was the right type of bacteria or if it was opportunistic. And I can't wait for you to tell us more about that. And then the rest of it is fiber, insoluble plant matter, undigested sugars, undigested protein, whatever other stuff, and then some cells and mucus. The rest of that 50%. And the breakdown depends on what you're eating.
34:23 Speaker 01 But Erin, unless you have any other questions, I'm going to transition to you.
34:28 Speaker 04 Okay. I mean, I just, okay, so there's so much bacteria. I just didn't, that's incredible.
34:34 Speaker 01 I know.
34:34 Speaker 04 Oh, I do have a question about just like water in general. So, you know, obviously we're drinking a lot of water. How does dehydration play a role in poop formation?
34:45 Speaker 01 Huge role, especially in constipation. So like the biggest, one of the biggest risks with diarrhea is that your colon is not absorbing that water.
34:55 Speaker 04 Yep.
34:56 Speaker 01 And so you're at really high risk of dehydration because now you're losing one to two liters of water or more, depending on how much you're pooping. And so that's a huge risk of diarrhea. And so if you are dehydrated, your colon is still going to absorb 90% or more of the water that is left in your colon.
35:14 Speaker 04 Okay.
35:15 Speaker 01 But if you are dehydrated to begin with, then you're not drinking as much water. There's not as much water making it there. And so that's why you're at risk of constipation.
35:24 Speaker 04 Got it.
35:25 Speaker 01 Yep. My second episode is now also done.
35:30 Speaker 01 Just kidding. So I'm gonna just end this by saying, if we think back again to what our poop is made out of, right?
35:38 Speaker 04 Yes.
35:38 Speaker 01 It's bacteria, it's plant matter, it's fats and proteins. If you go even more nitty gritty on it, our poop is hydrogen and oxygen.
35:48 Speaker 04 Sure.
35:49 Speaker 01 Water, carbon, nitrogen, especially from the bacteria and undigested protein. And then there's some amount of inorganic matter that we haven't used or that came from these cells like iron and calcium and phosphate. There's salts. So really, Erin, poop is just the building blocks of life.
36:08 Speaker 04 Uh, duh.
36:09 Speaker 01 So tell me about how animals use it.
36:14 Speaker 04 Oh, I can't wait.
36:16 Speaker 01 Great.
36:16 Speaker 04 I cannot wait. Okay.
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38:11 Speaker 04 We have so many names for poop.
38:14 Speaker 01 I know.
38:14 Speaker 04 So many names. There's excrement, which comes from the Latin to separate or sift out.
38:22 Speaker 01 Okay.
38:22 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm. Turd. I love turd. It comes from similar meanings, which I find interesting. To split, flay, torn off the body.
38:32 Speaker 01 Interesting.
38:32 Speaker 04 Crap originates from the word for residue, specifically from rendered fat.
38:38 Speaker 01 I love the word crap.
38:39 Speaker 04 I do too. I think turd is still, but like crap is more versatile.
38:44 Speaker 01 Right. Like, ah, crap.
38:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:45 Speaker 01 I can imagine my two-year-old saying it and it just cracks me up.
38:49 Speaker 04 There's feces, which is from the Latin for sediment or dregs. Stool, I don't need to take us on that etymological journey. It's longer, but it basically is like throne is part of it, which I find fascinating.
39:01 Speaker 01 Like a chair.
39:02 Speaker 04 Like toilet. Yeah.
39:02 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting.
39:03 Speaker 04 It's like, okay, fine. I'll take, I'll take us on this journey. It started as seat for one person, as in like throne. And then to the other stool that we think of today, you know, like the just stool, like the little stool. To then privy to then poop.
39:17 Speaker 01 Huh.
39:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:18 Speaker 01 Interesting.
39:18 Speaker 04 Dung, manure, poop. Do you want to know where poop comes from?
39:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:25 Speaker 04 It comes from the, okay. Does not come from poop deck, which I think is a common.
39:29 Speaker 01 Like swabbing the poop deck?
39:31 Speaker 04 Yep.
39:31 Speaker 01 Those are not the same?
39:32 Speaker 04 Does not, not the same.
39:33 Speaker 01 Oh.
39:33 Speaker 04 Not the same etymological origin, I think. So poop probably comes from the Middle English word poopen, palpen, referring to the sound a horn makes, which then became fart.
39:45 Speaker 01 Fart.
39:45 Speaker 04 And then through onomatopoeia became poop.
39:51 Speaker 04 And then there are so many words that we use to describe animal poop. Droppings, scat, which means any wild animal poop. Guano, bat and bird poop.
40:02 Speaker 01 Have some of that.
40:03 Speaker 04 Yep, bring out the guano.
40:04 Speaker 01 This is some bat guano. Again, thank you to the San Diego Natural History Museum.
40:10 Speaker 01 We've got some carnivore poop.
40:12 Speaker 04 Some carnivore poop.
40:13 Speaker 01 Look at that. So gross.
40:15 Speaker 04 It is, yep. Yep, that's carnivore poop. There's frass, which is like insect waste.
40:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:23 Speaker 04 Yep, spraint.
40:24 Speaker 01 Oh, I haven't heard that.
40:25 Speaker 04 Otter poop specifically.
40:27 Speaker 01 I'm sorry, I don't have an example of that.
40:29 Speaker 04 I, I just was like, wait.
40:30 Speaker 01 Otters get their own poop category?
40:33 Speaker 04 So I don't know. I tried to look up others like species, specific names for poop and I couldn't really find very many. I didn't do a huge search. I mean, just cubic poop. That's all really I know about that. I don't think that's, that's not the, that's not the name. But perhaps the most versatile word for poop is S H I T.
40:52 Speaker 01 I know. We have a non-explicit rating, so we're not going to say the word.
40:56 Speaker 04 We're not going to say it. But like, I do love, so it shares a similar kind of etymological origin as excrement and turd. It comes from this idea of separation from the body, which also means it shares an origin with the word science.
41:11 Speaker 01 Really?
41:11 Speaker 04 Meaning to like separate one thing from another. So.
41:15 Speaker 01 That's so interesting.
41:16 Speaker 04 Poop and science have the same, well, not poop, excrement and science have the same origin-ish. Actually, S H I T. But anyway, so, but like, yeah, S H I T has so many different, we can attach that word to like shoot the bull. You know, chicken, whatever.
41:33 Speaker 01 I love it.
41:34 Speaker 04 I blank my pants.
41:38 Speaker 04 That kind of thing. But there is no shortage of the ways to refer to the gut-derived waste that we leave behind. But none of these words properly convey the respect and appreciation that poop truly deserves.
41:53 Speaker 01 It's true.
41:53 Speaker 04 Even the word waste, which is one of our more like, you know, polite words for poop, means something of no use. Something you don't want, something that you like, you're like, I don't need this.
42:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:03 Speaker 04 Get it away from me. Can that be said for poop? I mean, as a species, we have devised massive, intricate sewer systems, true feats of engineering, to increase the distance between us and poop. Feces, poop, elicits a feeling of disgust universally across all cultures, probably evolutionarily ingrained because avoidance of feces would also help to avoid disease.
42:28 Speaker 01 Right.
42:29 Speaker 04 So, yes, not wanting to be around poop is reasonable. It's adaptive. But labeling it as waste really only tells one part of the story. Poop as a problem to deal with. And that's the story that I'm going to tell more of next week. But this week, my goal is to shine a more appreciative light on this dark matter.
42:53 Speaker 01 Dark matter, that's another good one.
42:55 Speaker 04 There's a book, I stole that from that. It's called The Other Dark Matter. But because without poop, and especially the creatures that repurpose it, our planet would be a vastly different place. A lifeless, empty shell. So we have a lot to thank poop for. And this is, we had a parasite appreciation hour at one point. This is the poop appreciation hour.
43:15 Speaker 01 Oh, I love it. I'm here for it. Let's appreciate some poop.
43:18 Speaker 04 Let's appreciate it. Okay, here we go. When I started traveling to Panama to do fieldwork for my PhD, I picked up the book Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miata. And by now, I've forgotten most of what I learned in that book. But there was one piece of advice that has stuck with me. If you want to see the forest come to life, watch what happens after you poop. In the woods. Okay, I'm reading a quote from this. "After nature calls, do not beat a hasty, embarrassed retreat, but sit quietly nearby. The earliest contestants will arrive soon after you settle down. First are the tiny dung scarab beetles and metallic o-titted flies.
44:01 Speaker 04 The later arrivals are larger and behaviorally more complex scarab beetles. Upon landing, they embark on a series of maneuvers designed to secure a private cache of food that they will either eat themselves or barter for copulatory rights. While the scarabs are carting away dung, long, sleek, staphylinid beetles arrive on the scene. Agile and voracious, they burrow under the dung mass in search of their prey." Of all the dung deposited in tropical rainforest, human scat is the most avidly sought and the most quickly removed. More than 50 species of dung scarabs may converge on a pile of our manure before it is gone.
44:41 Speaker 01 50 species? I don't even think I knew there were that many species of dung beetle.
44:46 Speaker 04 Oh, there are... Do I have it? We'll see.
44:50 Speaker 01 Lots.
44:50 Speaker 04 Lots. Many more than 50 species. Isn't that great?
44:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:57 Speaker 04 I love that. So anyway, that is a piece of advice that I will also
45:00 Speaker 01 Okay.
45:00 Speaker 04 say, "Do this. Do this."
45:02 Speaker 01 Do poop in the woods.
45:04 Speaker 04 Do poop in the woods. Poop in the woods.
45:05 Speaker 01 In the tropics specifically? Like, does it have to be tropics?
45:08 Speaker 04 No, there are dung beetles on every continent except Antarctica. Yeah. They, I mean, they really are the unsung heroes of poop. I mean, in fact, all heroes of poop, including like the microbes and the fungi.
45:23 Speaker 01 And they're just so cute.
45:24 Speaker 04 And they're so cute. They're all unsung, right? Because no one really appreciates dung beetles.
45:29 Speaker 01 What they do for the environment.
45:30 Speaker 04 Yeah. Because without them, we would be buried in the stuff. Because they take our waste product and they use it themselves, or they turn it into something that other organisms like plants can use. Case in point. Australia, in the years following European colonization.
45:47 Speaker 01 Okay.
45:48 Speaker 04 Dung beetles are globally distributed. Like I said, every continent except Antarctica, but they can be pretty picky about the poop that they utilize. When cattle were introduced to Australia by Europeans, the dung beetles there, which had evolved on a diet of marsupial poop primarily,
46:05 Speaker 01 Interesting.
46:06 Speaker 04 were not interested in this new cattle dung.
46:10 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
46:10 Speaker 04 And the poop began to accumulate at a rate that approached 33 million tons per year.
46:20 Speaker 04 Just mounds.
46:21 Speaker 01 It's like honestly so much poop that you can't, you can't imagine.
46:25 Speaker 04 I can't even visualize.
46:25 Speaker 01 33 million tons.
46:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about more other poop quantities that there's better visualizations, but this one I don't have a good one for.
46:33 Speaker 01 That's huge.
46:34 Speaker 04 Huge, huge. Pest fly populations grew out of control and grazing land shrank because the cattle were like, I'm not going to graze near these towering piles of manure. That's gross.
46:45 Speaker 01 Gross.
46:46 Speaker 04 Yeah. And after about 180 years of this, the government decided they just couldn't take it anymore.
46:51 Speaker 01 180 years.
46:53 Speaker 04 I mean, that's like when the first cows were imported.
46:57 Speaker 01 Okay, but still.
46:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, the first fleet, yeah. So between 1968 and 1982, in a move that I find shocking, considering the issues that introduced species have caused in the past, guess what Australia did?
47:12 Speaker 01 Introduced some dung beetles.
47:13 Speaker 04 They did. 55 different species of dung beetles, primarily from Southern Africa.
47:18 Speaker 01 Risky.
47:20 Speaker 04 I know, risky.
47:21 Speaker 01 Risky.
47:22 Speaker 04 But.
47:23 Speaker 01 But it paid off?
47:24 Speaker 04 It paid off.
47:25 Speaker 01 Okay.
47:26 Speaker 04 About eight species took hold and since have been relatively successful in restoring some of the Australian pasture.
47:31 Speaker 01 It's, that's so interesting, Erin. Have we ever done an episode that's like just focused on the introduced species issues? We haven't. It's very outside of our, and yet inside of our personal interest.
47:42 Speaker 04 We should do that. Let's do fire ants.
47:44 Speaker 01 Okay.
47:45 Speaker 04 Okay.
47:46 Speaker 01 All right.
47:47 Speaker 04 Done.
47:48 Speaker 01 Done.
47:50 Speaker 04 But these dung beetles, I mean, it just showed how integral they are in the poop cycle and what valuable work they perform. So for about 15% of the Earth's ice-free surface is used for agriculture.
48:02 Speaker 01 Okay.
48:03 Speaker 04 And that translates into a lot of livestock dung, much of which is handled by dung beetles and other decomposers. In 2006, that's, that's like, it's 20 years ago, but you know, it's fine. Dung beetle contributions to the US beef cattle industry alone were estimated at $380 million per year.
48:23 Speaker 01 And no one's paying them.
48:24 Speaker 04 No one's paying them. They're getting paid in poop.
48:27 Speaker 01 They're getting paid in poop.
48:28 Speaker 04 And they're happy about that.
48:29 Speaker 01 They're thrilled.
48:30 Speaker 04 Yeah. By reintegrating dung into the landscape, dung beetles are helping to fertilize the soil, cycle nutrients, distribute seeds, both reduce and distribute parasites, which have a role in ecosystems as well.
48:42 Speaker 01 We still appreciate parasites.
48:43 Speaker 04 We love parasites. They're, they control pest fly populations. Some are even pollinators.
48:50 Speaker 01 Really?
48:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't know how, so don't ask.
48:52 Speaker 01 That's fine.
48:54 Speaker 04 For the past 40 million years, dung beetles have been bringing new meaning to the phrase, "One man's trash is another's treasure."
49:02 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, I love it.
49:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. Over 5,000 species. There it is. I do have it. 5,000 species.
49:08 Speaker 01 5,000 species?
49:09 Speaker 04 I mean, that makes sense, though, because like, think about niche differentiation.
49:13 Speaker 01 I know, but just of dung beetle?
49:14 Speaker 04 Dung beetle.
49:15 Speaker 01 Oh, insects are so cool.
49:17 Speaker 04 I know.
49:17 Speaker 01 Okay.
49:18 Speaker 04 We are, oh, speaking of, if you are watching on YouTube, we have these sweet dung beetle shirts.
49:23 Speaker 01 Shout out to UC Davis Entomology Department.
49:26 Speaker 04 And there are very, there are other cute shirts that we saw there, too, but we just had to have these dung beetle shirts.
49:30 Speaker 01 Thank you for selling them.
49:31 Speaker 04 Yes.
49:34 Speaker 04 But yeah, among dung beetles, there are rollers that transport balls of dung to later bury under the soil. There are tunnellers, which bury the dung close to where it fell. There are dwellers, which live in the poop or brood their young in the poop.
49:49 Speaker 01 In the poop.
49:50 Speaker 04 And dung beetles are not innovators, right? Like, they didn't inherit a planet that was piled high with poop. They are carrying on a tradition that is foundational to life as we know it, whereby, quote unquote, "waste" is in the eye of the beholder. For the earliest microbes, oxygen was thought was waste, right? It was a toxic byproduct. Carbon dioxide was king. And then came along the aerobic bacteria for whom oxygen was not just like weight. It wasn't just not waste, but it was essential.
50:20 Speaker 01 Essential. Essential. Oh, Erin, we're going deep time.
50:22 Speaker 04 We are. I mean, that's, that's like as deep as we're gonna go. Just a little bit of a dive and then back up.
50:27 Speaker 01 Hi, love it.
50:28 Speaker 04 But what one organism produces as waste, another views as an opportunity. For us, we may view the poop that we produce as waste and nothing more. Like, get this away from me. It stinks. It's gross. It's gonna make me sick. But for dung beetles and flies and earthworms and soil microbes and fungi, our poop is a rich substance packed full of nutrients. It's a place to raise your young, to make your mark, and to do your part to reuse and recycle.
50:57 Speaker 01 I love imagining them like telling their kids this like, okay, kids, you get ready.
51:01 Speaker 04 Carry on the family biz.
51:03 Speaker 01 One kid is like, Dad, can we just eat like broccoli instead of coke?
51:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:11 Speaker 04 But we really don't give these organisms, these king mituses of the world enough credit for transforming our waste into a pile of gold.
51:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:19 Speaker 04 That waste comes in all shapes and sizes, from the cube shaped poop of a wombat, which has something to do with just the way that it.
51:27 Speaker 01 Their colon.
51:28 Speaker 04 Their, yeah.
51:29 Speaker 01 Peristalsis.
51:30 Speaker 04 To the kidney shaped dung of a horse. The pellets of rabbits.
51:35 Speaker 01 I did not know that horse poop is shaped like a kidney, like a bean.
51:39 Speaker 04 Beanish, yeah.
51:40 Speaker 01 Interesting.
51:40 Speaker 04 Beanie, yeah. To the cylindrical tubes of carnivores.
51:45 Speaker 01 And us.
51:46 Speaker 04 And us, and omnivores.
51:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't know if all omnivores have cylindrical poop.
51:52 Speaker 01 Listen, me neither.
51:53 Speaker 04 There are generalizations that we can make and there are exceptions to everything.
51:58 Speaker 01 There's probably a Bristol's tool scale for every animal, just kidding.
52:02 Speaker 04 Well, I was actually thinking that there probably should, right? Like, there would be.
52:05 Speaker 01 There would be.
52:06 Speaker 04 Because a sick rabbit probably wouldn't produce.
52:08 Speaker 01 My dog's poop ranges.
52:10 Speaker 04 Oh, God.
52:10 Speaker 01 In texture.
52:12 Speaker 04 And I'm like, how am I supposed to get this off of the grass? It is just embedded instantly.
52:16 Speaker 01 Especially the second or third poop of the walk. It's just like, ugh.
52:19 Speaker 04 You know, when it's a third poop and you're just like, please don't.
52:22 Speaker 01 There's no way to do it.
52:22 Speaker 04 Just please, there's nothing.
52:24 Speaker 01 Be low grass at least, so you can wipe it.
52:31 Speaker 04 On second thought, I'm glad we don't have more pictures for this episode.
52:34 Speaker 01 It's a good thing.
52:37 Speaker 04 But the variation in poop across the animal kingdom is so vast that you might wonder if there are any real common threads. And it turns out that there are.
52:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
52:45 Speaker 04 So by modeling how different species pooped, some researchers concluded that the magic number for poop duration.
52:53 Speaker 01 Is 12 seconds.
52:54 Speaker 04 Yes.
52:54 Speaker 01 I found this paper, Erin, and I told my whole family about it. And now my kid counts every time he goes to the bathroom and he's like, what? And I'm like, it's been more than 12 seconds, bro.
53:05 Speaker 04 I've been counting my dog and I'm like, seven? Are you okay?
53:08 Speaker 01 Same, but it was 12 plus or minus seven seconds. That was the error bar.
53:12 Speaker 04 Plus or minus seven seconds. I mean, okay, that's still like quite a small range, just in terms of, yeah.
53:16 Speaker 01 Cause it was like from elephants to rabbits or something.
53:19 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
53:20 Speaker 01 Give it to me here.
53:20 Speaker 04 So like, okay, elephants poop 15 pounds a day.
53:23 Speaker 01 15 pounds?
53:25 Speaker 04 Pounds, yeah.
53:26 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh.
53:27 Speaker 04 Which is 100 times more than a dog poops.
53:31 Speaker 01 Wow.
53:32 Speaker 04 Elephants poop at a rate of 3 inches per second.
53:38 Speaker 01 Keep going.
53:39 Speaker 04 Dogs poop at about a rate of 0.5 inches per second.
53:42 Speaker 01 Okay, so it's a much smaller volume, but same rate.
53:46 Speaker 04 Same rate. And humans are like just under an inch a second. Although are humans actually pooping 12 seconds? Absolutely not.
53:53 Speaker 01 We'll talk more about it next week.
53:54 Speaker 04 We'll talk more about that next week. But they're both like, how? How is an elephant pooping 15 pounds and a dog poop? You know, like, how are they all pooping?
54:00 Speaker 01 The poop from like the time that it exits the anus until the time it's done on the floor is 12 seconds, plus or minus.
54:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
54:07 Speaker 01 From an elephant to a dog.
54:09 Speaker 04 To a dog.
54:09 Speaker 01 A Chihuahua even.
54:11 Speaker 04 Yeah. How?
54:12 Speaker 01 How?
54:13 Speaker 04 The mucus.
54:14 Speaker 01 The mucus.
54:15 Speaker 04 It is the mucus that lines our intestines. It keeps everything moving along, getting there, getting out there smoothly.
54:21 Speaker 01 I just love this so much.
54:22 Speaker 04 I'm so glad that you also found the 12 seconds.
54:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
54:26 Speaker 04 That's all I have for like the commonalities, though, for poop.
54:28 Speaker 01 It's changed my life forever, though.
54:30 Speaker 04 Me too.
54:31 Speaker 01 Oh, we're gonna talk more about it next week. The 12 seconds will come up again.
54:33 Speaker 04 12 is the number, is the magic number.
54:35 Speaker 01 We should be able to poop in 12 seconds because we have cylindrical poops, just like all of these mammals that they modeled.
54:41 Speaker 04 I mean, fiber. Is that the bottom line?
54:44 Speaker 01 Paper was out of Georgia Tech. For a second, I thought it was also out of Davis and I was gonna give them another shout out, but it was Georgia Tech.
54:49 Speaker 04 I don't know. I read it in a book.
54:51 Speaker 01 I did too, but then I found the paper because I was like, loved it so much.
54:54 Speaker 04 You were like, I need to know more. But yeah, as far as commonalities, like that's all I've got.
54:59 Speaker 01 Fascinating.
55:00 Speaker 04 But the scent, the shape, the color, texture, and location of poop, they vary so much across the animal kingdom and they can tell us about the animal that produced it and the kind of life that it is leading.
55:11 Speaker 01 Okay.
55:11 Speaker 04 Right? So scent can tell us what the animal ate. Carnivore poop tends to smell much worse to us than herbivore poop.
55:19 Speaker 01 To us, okay.
55:20 Speaker 04 Although scent is definitely, again, in the nose of the beholder, right? Like...
55:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
55:25 Speaker 04 As anyone who has had a dog can attest, watching as their dog rolls in something unspeakably foul.
55:31 Speaker 01 So disgusting.
55:31 Speaker 04 And I'm just like, why?
55:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:33 Speaker 04 Why?
55:33 Speaker 01 I still don't know why.
55:34 Speaker 04 There are a lot of reasons why, actually. Scent is a really powerful method of communication. So for instance, it can alert a predator to prey species nearby. This is one reason why your dog might be rolling in poop, just to be like, I'm not a, I'm not a prey.
55:47 Speaker 01 It's not me, I'm not here.
55:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, or like, I, I am a, you know, mighty predator, smell my body.
55:52 Speaker 01 Smell my scent.
55:53 Speaker 04 My own feces, yeah.
55:56 Speaker 04 So it might be like a disguising of scent. Sharks apparently can recognize the poop of seals and humans and have, may use it as a cue to like, oh, there's prey nearby. Certain sharks.
56:08 Speaker 01 Wow.
56:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
56:10 Speaker 01 I feel like you hear so much about how much sharks can scent blood, you know, like they can sense blood, but I never thought about them using poop as a, that makes sense because it would just be floating in the.
56:20 Speaker 04 Right.
56:22 Speaker 01 Interesting.
56:22 Speaker 04 And also poop would tell you more about the individual animal than blood.
56:27 Speaker 01 Than just blood, yeah.
56:28 Speaker 04 Right.
56:29 Speaker 01 Blood is just.
56:29 Speaker 04 I mean, I'm sure blood is also a cue, but like.
56:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
56:32 Speaker 04 Poop apparently too.
56:34 Speaker 01 Juicy juicy seal.
56:36 Speaker 04 Yep.
56:36 Speaker 01 Up ahead to the right.
56:39 Speaker 04 Take a left at the buoy, I don't know.
56:42 Speaker 01 Coral head.
56:43 Speaker 04 Some species bury their poop. Or they shoot their poop in a projectile manner to throw predators off the trail. Butterflies do this, called frash shooting.
56:52 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh.
56:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
56:54 Speaker 01 Okay.
56:55 Speaker 04 The smell of poop can also signal to other members of your species, like, hey, this is mine, this is my territory, pause off.
57:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel like big cats do that.
57:03 Speaker 04 Hippo, yeah, and also hippos do this.
57:05 Speaker 01 Hippos?
57:05 Speaker 04 Big cats do this, yeah.
57:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
57:08 Speaker 04 Their, their tails will be like helicopters and they're like.
57:13 Speaker 01 Just getting their poop all over their little spot?
57:16 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm. Some species have specialized glands that leave concentrated scents, like dogs. They might even have, other species have communal latrines where they all go poop. It's kind of like a very stinky message board, like, hey, what's everyone up to? Who's down to like, party this weekend?
57:31 Speaker 01 Do they hang out there or?
57:32 Speaker 04 I don't think they hang out there, I think they just poop and walk away, yeah. Certain infections might make poop have a distinctive smell like C. diff. Kind of warns like, hey, this is, I'm not, I'm not good.
57:44 Speaker 01 I am unwell.
57:44 Speaker 04 Don't roll in this. And for those species that have a keen sense of smell, poop is a rich source of information. And we humans have harnessed that power for our own data gathering.
57:55 Speaker 01 What?
57:55 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
57:56 Speaker 01 Tell me.
57:56 Speaker 04 So there are several researchers that have trained dogs to search for and alert to the poops of certain species to help with like estimating biodiversity or where animals are distributed in a region, things like territory size, habitat preference, diet composition, and so on. It's hard for us to find poop.
58:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:14 Speaker 04 In a landscape.
58:14 Speaker 01 Right.
58:14 Speaker 04 But a dog is like.
58:16 Speaker 01 They know exactly where it is.
58:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, you've just got to train them to not roll in it.
58:19 Speaker 01 So then they, they use the dogs to find the poop and then they examine the poop.
58:22 Speaker 04 They'll look at the poop.
58:23 Speaker 01 Oh, fascinating.
58:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:24 Speaker 01 That's so cool.
58:25 Speaker 04 There are even whale poop sniffing dogs.
58:28 Speaker 01 Whale poop?
58:29 Speaker 04 Whale poop sniffing dogs. Oh, yeah. Whale poop is, I, I cut a huge, I, there was like a quote about the different like colors and shapes that whale poop can come in.
58:38 Speaker 01 I've never thought about whale poop.
58:40 Speaker 04 Mm hmm. Oh, yeah.
58:42 Speaker 01 Do the, do the dogs sniff the whale poop on the, like, when it washes up on the shore?
58:46 Speaker 04 I think they're, they go on boats.
58:48 Speaker 01 They go on boats and they can sniff it from the water?
58:51 Speaker 04 Uh huh. I think because it's pretty diffuse, like it'll just.
58:54 Speaker 01 What?
58:55 Speaker 04 Yeah. And like a plume.
58:57 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, I love this so much.
58:59 Speaker 04 And so there are some dogs that will like, I think it's orcas specifically, that they'll like track individual whales to be like, okay, let's now test the water or test the poop and like, let's check their health.
59:09 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
59:10 Speaker 04 I know.
59:11 Speaker 01 That's so cool.
59:11 Speaker 04 I know, I know. And so we, we may not be able to smell as well as our canine companions, but once we get our hands on some poop, there is really like no end to what we can tell. So Erin, you took us through the Bristol stool scale, but that's just one species.
59:25 Speaker 01 Right.
59:26 Speaker 04 Consider the variation that you might find if you are tracking a bear, a black bear throughout, throughout the course of a year, right? Like, where does that bear live on the east, you know, in the east, in the, on the west, north or south? How does that influence its diet? Is it a cicada year? Is it living in a more urban environment and digging in trash? Or is it just like total wilderness?
59:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:47 Speaker 04 Is it eating huckleberries or blackberries? Fish or squirrels? You know, like there's, is it an older bear or a baby bear? There are there parasites? Is it stressed? I mean, poop is an informational pile of gold.
59:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:59 Speaker 04 Even if we don't know whose poop we've just stumbled upon on a hike in the woods, we can usually make some guesses based on its shape or its size. Carnivores tend to poop less than herbivores. Their scat often will contain like hair or bones. And so if you see that, you're like, oh, carnivore.
1:00:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a little coyote poop.
1:00:18 Speaker 04 Yep, and it comes in a more cylindrical shape. Um, herbivores, on the other hand, poop way more. And their poop tends to be floatier with plant material. So that's carnivore. If you're, if you're tuning in on YouTube, we have some samples.
1:00:32 Speaker 01 Some carnivore poop, some herbivore poop.
1:00:34 Speaker 04 Some herbivore poop. So that's like mountain lion and rabbit right there. And, um, yeah, so like the herbivore poop is like floatier poop. There's plant material and it could vary from like sheep pellets.
1:00:46 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:00:47 Speaker 04 To cow pies and so on. And it depends in part on how much moisture an animal retains.
1:00:52 Speaker 01 Of course, as we know.
1:00:54 Speaker 04 So for example, we think of these rabbit pellets as little hard balls. But rabbits also produce another type of poop that is softer and more nutrient dense. And we don't really see this type of poop because they produce it in their dens and they typically eat it.
1:01:07 Speaker 01 No.
1:01:08 Speaker 04 Straight away.
1:01:09 Speaker 01 I knew you were gonna say that.
1:01:09 Speaker 04 Right from the source, often.
1:01:12 Speaker 01 They eat it themselves?
1:01:13 Speaker 04 They eat it themselves. I mean, a lot of animals will eat their babies poop, too. And that's for a number of reasons. Part, it's like re-extraction of nutrients. Um, and it's not just rabbits. It's a lot, mice, uh, cows, termites. Sometimes, again, it's like nutrient reabsorption. Cows, I'll tell you in a second. Um, it could be to conceal the poop of their offspring from predators. Or some researchers, especially when it comes to cows, think it might be a strategy to refresh the gut microbiota during a bout of intestinal disease.
1:01:44 Speaker 01 Oh, that's so interesting.
1:01:45 Speaker 04 So like when cows are really showing like not good poops, they'll sometimes eat it to be like, do I need to get, something like that.
1:01:51 Speaker 01 That's so interesting. Like, why would you want to eat the poop? You would think like, let me eat my friend's poop.
1:01:57 Speaker 04 Right. Yeah.
1:01:58 Speaker 01 If my friend's not pooping bad and I'm pooping bad, I'll eat my friend's poop.
1:02:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, let's find the best cow pie here and make a little meal.
1:02:05 Speaker 01 They pick their own, they eat their own poop.
1:02:06 Speaker 04 I think they eat their own, yeah.
1:02:07 Speaker 01 Gross.
1:02:08 Speaker 04 And before we turn up our noses at this, it's probably too late. Some of the most expensive coffee in the world is made from beans that have passed through the bowels of a palm civet.
1:02:20 Speaker 01 Civet?
1:02:20 Speaker 04 Have you heard of this?
1:02:20 Speaker 01 Civet poop coffee?
1:02:21 Speaker 04 Civet poop coffee, yeah. Kopi Luwak, it's the civet coffee. It's not the only prized poo product.
1:02:27 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:02:28 Speaker 04 There's also.
1:02:28 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:02:29 Speaker 04 Ambergris.
1:02:30 Speaker 01 Ambergris, what is that?
1:02:31 Speaker 04 Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I am so glad you asked. I was gonna tell you anyway, but.
1:02:38 Speaker 01 Well, tell me now.
1:02:39 Speaker 04 Thank you for asking. For over a thousand years, ambergris has been one of the most valuable and sought-after natural substances. What is it? It is a hardened mass of fecal material and undigested squid beaks that forms in the intestines and rectum of about 5% of sperm whales.
1:03:00 Speaker 01 Sorry.
1:03:02 Speaker 04 Yeah. Let me know if you need me to reread that.
1:03:04 Speaker 01 Can you, just so that I can really visualize?
1:03:06 Speaker 04 Sure, okay. Hardened mass of fecal material. And undigested squid beaks.
1:03:12 Speaker 01 Because they're just chunks of, yeah.
1:03:13 Speaker 04 That forms in the intestines and rectum of about 5% of sperm whales.
1:03:18 Speaker 01 5%. So it's basically constipated sperm whale, uh, rectal mass.
1:03:24 Speaker 04 Exactly.
1:03:26 Speaker 01 And people eat this, or?
1:03:28 Speaker 04 Oh, they do all kinds of things with it. Okay, so the reason that it like, forms into a hard mass, so of course sperm whales eat squids, uh, they can't digest their beaks, and so usually they'll vomit the beaks up. That is their strategy. Because whale poop is liquid, and if some get through all the way, it just gets stuck.
1:03:48 Speaker 01 It's like a beesore.
1:03:50 Speaker 04 Exactly. And so because the, um, the poop, like the rectum can't relax enough to let the poop, or to let the squid beaks through, and so then it just sort of forms and forms into, these beaks will mold together, form into this big mass.
1:04:03 Speaker 01 Really is constipated.
1:04:04 Speaker 04 It's like a hardened ball of huge chunk of hardened whale poop and squid beaks. And what happens, there's kind of two different schools of thought. One is that finally the rectum relaxes enough to let it out. The person whose book I read was like, I don't think that happens. I think that it bursts and the whale dies.
1:04:21 Speaker 01 The whale dies.
1:04:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:04:22 Speaker 01 So people aren't killing sperm whales to get this? I mean, I know they killed them for lots of things.
1:04:27 Speaker 04 There was, um, they would have, and they probably did for a while. So for a long time, this was called, uh, floating gold, because people were just finding it on the surfaces of the ocean, and they were like, this smells amazing, this is like... We could use this for everything. Oh, yeah.
1:04:45 Speaker 01 How could it possibly smell?
1:04:47 Speaker 04 Oh, I mean, yeah. Uh, and so, but then it was when whaling kind of picked up in the 1700s, 1800s, that people finally were like, they would kill a whale and be like, oh, my God, it's ambergris. Can you believe it?
1:04:59 Speaker 01 So that's where they figured out where it came from?
1:05:00 Speaker 04 Yeah. So that's the most, finally, it was like, there were different theories, like, oh, I think it's, well, I can't remember some of the other theories.
1:05:07 Speaker 01 What did they use it for, Erin?
1:05:08 Speaker 04 They used it for, um, medicine, a condiment, an aphrodisiac, and it is still today incorporated as a fixative and a musky scent in perfumes. Fixative, meaning like it makes the smell, like the scent stay stronger. So it's still used today. And it is, I mean, floating gold. So there was a chunk of ambergris found in 1914 that weighed 455 kilograms.
1:05:33 Speaker 01 Oh, big.
1:05:35 Speaker 04 Massive. And it sold then in 1914 for 23,000 pounds, which in today's money is 3.4 million pounds or four and a half million dollars. So that...
1:05:49 Speaker 01 It's more than gold.
1:05:50 Speaker 04 It's more than gold. Actually, I don't know if that is.
1:05:53 Speaker 01 It's probably not. Gold is so expensive right now.
1:05:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's wild.
1:05:57 Speaker 01 But, okay, uh, this is, I am fascinated.
1:06:01 Speaker 04 I love this.
1:06:02 Speaker 01 So if you, if we like checked on the back of like a perfume bottle, and if it says ambergris on it, that means it's, it is, it is constipated sperm whale.
1:06:09 Speaker 04 I mean, I've never, I've never looked at the back of a perfume bottle and saw a list of ingredients, but I think you would probably be able to find perfumes that contain ambergris.
1:06:18 Speaker 01 Fascinating.
1:06:19 Speaker 04 Do you want to know what it smells like?
1:06:20 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:06:21 Speaker 04 Okay. According to a new scientist article, it has a rich and complex odor consisting of, quote, "fine tobacco, the wood of old churches, the smell of the tide, sandalwood, fresh earth, and seaweed in the sun."
1:06:36 Speaker 01 I believe seaweed and fresh tide. Because let me tell you, I've smelled a lot of squid in my life.
1:06:43 Speaker 04 I, I want it to be fine tobacco in the wood of old churches specifically.
1:06:47 Speaker 01 That's quite specific.
1:06:48 Speaker 04 Right. What about an old church, you know?
1:06:51 Speaker 01 I know, there's some...
1:06:52 Speaker 04 How old?
1:06:54 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't have any answers.
1:06:55 Speaker 04 I don't, I don't either. I have no answers. I mean, I'm left totally baffled still. Okay. Ambergris and Copie Luwak, done. They may be treasured as poop novelties. Are you ready to move on from Ambergris?
1:07:06 Speaker 01 I'm gonna think about it forever.
1:07:09 Speaker 04 Good. 12 seconds in Ambergris.
1:07:14 Speaker 04 But these two, they're not the only way that poop can be used.
1:07:16 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:07:17 Speaker 04 Poop can be used as fuel, as insulation, as insect repellent, as fertilizer, as building material, as paper. One elephant can produce enough dung in one day to make 115 sheets of paper.
1:07:29 Speaker 01 How do you make paper from poop?
1:07:31 Speaker 04 Fiber from the undigested-
1:07:33 Speaker 01 Cool.
1:07:33 Speaker 04 -plant material.
1:07:34 Speaker 01 Are people doing that? Can I buy elephant poop paper?
1:07:36 Speaker 04 Uh, Google it.
1:07:37 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:07:38 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, you know.
1:07:40 Speaker 01 We will, after this.
1:07:40 Speaker 04 We'll make some.
1:07:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:44 Speaker 04 We can DNA test it to determine the diet of an animal or catch a criminal.
1:07:49 Speaker 01 Ooh.
1:07:50 Speaker 04 This was done by matching DNA of dog feces at the scene of a crime to dog poop on the suspect's shoe.
1:07:56 Speaker 01 Oh, fascinating.
1:07:57 Speaker 04 Isn't that wild?
1:07:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:58 Speaker 04 I mean, talking about like thinking outside the box.
1:08:00 Speaker 01 It was coming from that dog. It was that same pile of poop.
1:08:03 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:08:03 Speaker 01 On a shoe.
1:08:03 Speaker 04 Cause they saw, like, I think in the crime scene photos, there was like a, yeah, like a schmear, like the dog poop schmear. And then someone had it.
1:08:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's why you gotta clean your shoes.
1:08:14 Speaker 04 I mean, or just like not, you know, murder people, but yeah.
1:08:22 Speaker 04 You choose.
1:08:23 Speaker 01 Both and.
1:08:25 Speaker 04 But poop is so crucial ecologically in seed dispersal and parasite transmission, but the most important role of poop is in nutrient redistribution. Critters like dung beetles that move and bury poop, soil microbes that transform it into plant food, animals like hippos and otters that live in water and on land, and they move nutrients across those boundaries.
1:08:46 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting.
1:08:48 Speaker 04 I know. Whales that feed at lower depths and then rise to poop and breathe. They redistribute nutrients across that depth.
1:08:56 Speaker 01 Oh, man.
1:08:57 Speaker 04 Fish poop and whale poop that helps to offset ocean acidification. Like, all of these are critical players in the poop nutrient cycle.
1:09:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:06 Speaker 04 But we humans are making it harder for them to do their work. As a planet, we are producing more poop than we have ever before produced.
1:09:15 Speaker 01 Is that just because we're more people?
1:09:17 Speaker 04 Uh, and more animals.
1:09:19 Speaker 01 Livestock?
1:09:19 Speaker 04 More livestock, yeah. And it's not even across the landscape. History has never seen the likes of the factory farming that exists throughout the world today. Okay, I'm gonna give you some numbers. So, in 1961, there were approximately 400 million pigs, 940 million cows.
1:09:36 Speaker 01 Around the world?
1:09:36 Speaker 04 Around the world.
1:09:37 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:09:38 Speaker 04 1.3 billion sheep and goats.
1:09:40 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:09:41 Speaker 04 And 3.9 billion chickens.
1:09:43 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:09:44 Speaker 04 Just over 60 years later, in 2023, which is the most recent data I could find, we are at 1 billion pigs, which is more than double.
1:09:53 Speaker 01 Whoa.
1:09:53 Speaker 04 1.6 billion cattle, up from 940 million. 2.2 billion sheep and goats.
1:09:59 Speaker 01 Ooh.
1:10:00 Speaker 04 And from 3.9 billion chickens in 1961, we're at 29 billion chickens.
1:10:07 Speaker 01 And we wonder why bird flu.
1:10:09 Speaker 04 We, do we wonder why bird flu? We know exactly why bird flu, yeah.
1:10:13 Speaker 01 Oh my god!
1:10:14 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm. And humans have more than doubled over that time, from 3 billion to 8 billion.
1:10:18 Speaker 01 But all of those numbers were like more than double.
1:10:21 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
1:10:21 Speaker 01 For the amount of humans.
1:10:22 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. Uh, each of us, humans, poops about 1% of our body weight a day.
1:10:29 Speaker 01 Love this.
1:10:29 Speaker 04 So, one of our entire selves every few months.
1:10:33 Speaker 01 Wow, we poop our weight every few months.
1:10:35 Speaker 04 Each year, domestic animals produce about 8 trillion pounds of poop, which is 10,000 Empire State Buildings, or 700 Great Pyramids of Giza.
1:10:46 Speaker 01 I, you, you cannot. Of poop. I can't, I cannot.
1:10:49 Speaker 04 That's the best visualization, because we can even still, how do we, how do we envision, envision that?
1:10:53 Speaker 01 I can envision the single Empire State.
1:10:55 Speaker 04 I know.
1:10:56 Speaker 01 10,000 of them?
1:10:57 Speaker 04 That's how much poop.
1:10:58 Speaker 01 That's more than New York City worth of poop.
1:11:01 Speaker 04 Oh my gosh, yeah. Oh, I think, oh, next episode I have a New York City poop statistic.
1:11:09 Speaker 04 But that excess poop, that incredible amount of poop that we are pooping now, it doesn't translate into more dung beetles and more nutrient-dense soils. Like I mentioned at the top, dung beetles can be picky about the poo they use, but even those that like cattle poop are under threat because of the pesticides that livestock are treated with, like ivermectin, which is then like excreted in their poop and is toxic to dung beetles. And so there are like dung beetle, there are like threatened dung beetles, or like deforestation can also reduce dung beetle.
1:11:39 Speaker 01 Population because they rely on other things too.
1:11:41 Speaker 04 Exactly, yeah.
1:11:44 Speaker 04 And I'm singling out dung beetles because they're really charismatic. You know, our shirts, like, you know, who else would want poop on a shirt? But this ripples far beyond dung beetle populations. Like, we are facing a global poop catastrophe. Too much of it, and in all the wrong places.
1:12:01 Speaker 01 Pootastrophe.
1:12:02 Speaker 04 Pootastrophe. Cock catastrophe. No, actually, I like that.
1:12:08 Speaker 01 You say cock catastrophe?
1:12:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:12 Speaker 01 A cock catastrophe, that's really funny.
1:12:14 Speaker 04 Thank you. Wow.
1:12:18 Speaker 04 But, you know, in the past, when poop has come up on this podcast, it's mostly been in the context of like, public health, right? Like, that wrong place has been in our water or our food supplies. But that's just one component. What about our farm runoff? Our waterways, our pasturelands leached of nutrients, and the poop just going down the river, right? And so I wanted to use these two episodes to approach poop from a different perspective than the typical public health one that we usually go with. It's one where we suspend our disgust, and we consider what poop represents not as a waste, but as a hugely valuable substance. And hopefully today, I have left you with a little bit more appreciation for crap, or at least some fun facts to share. 12 seconds, Amber Griss.
1:13:03 Speaker 04 And next week, I'll go into how we attempted to solve our poop problem over the centuries and what the future of waste management might hold. And that's all I've got for you today on poop.
1:13:14 Speaker 01 I love it.
1:13:15 Speaker 04 Except for sources.
1:13:17 Speaker 01 Erin, that was so much fun.
1:13:19 Speaker 04 I'm glad.
1:13:20 Speaker 01 I want to just keep going.
1:13:21 Speaker 04 I know. Well, that's good because we have another episode next week.
1:13:24 Speaker 01 Perfect.
1:13:24 Speaker 04 Yay.
1:13:26 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. That was really good. We should tell everyone where they could read more, though.
1:13:29 Speaker 04 There is so much. I mean, narrowing down the narrative for poop was
1:13:34 Speaker 01 It's impossible.
1:13:35 Speaker 04 ridiculous.
1:13:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:36 Speaker 04 And so there is so much more out there that you can read. Let me tell you
1:13:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:13:40 Speaker 04 a few examples. So, a couple of books. One by Joe Roman called Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World.
1:13:46 Speaker 01 Eat, poop, die. I mean, what else do you do?
1:13:49 Speaker 04 And then another one. This is, I think, my favorite title of a book that I've come across lately. So it's by David Waltner Toes, The Origin of Feces.
1:13:58 Speaker 01 The Origin of Feces.
1:14:00 Speaker 04 It's so good.
1:14:01 Speaker 01 That's good.
1:14:01 Speaker 04 It's good. And then there's a paper by Robert Clark, The Origin of Ambergris, and then by Nichols et al. From 2008, Ecological Functions and Ecosystem Services Provided by Scarabina Day Dung Beetles.
1:14:15 Speaker 01 I love it.
1:14:16 Speaker 04 And more on the website.
1:14:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. My sources are not as much like fun because I mostly used a textbook that was incredibly boring. But shout out to the people who wrote it because it was quite useful. It was called The Digestive System: From Basic Sciences to Clinical Practice. I didn't read the whole thing. It was like 400-plus pages, but it's quite useful. So especially if you want more about poop. I also have a few different papers here. There's the Characterization of Feces in Urine: A Review of the Literature to Inform Advanced Treatment Technology. I actually really loved that. It was a paper from 2015 in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology by Rose et al. And then there was a paper that I, or a book that I only read part of.
1:14:57 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:14:57 Speaker 01 But I really enjoyed the parts that I read, so I'm going to give it a shout out. It was called Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure. Did you read that book, though?
1:15:04 Speaker 04 No.
1:15:04 Speaker 01 It was a good, it was interesting.
1:15:06 Speaker 04 Wow, I looked up so many poop books.
1:15:08 Speaker 01 I don't know how I came across this book.
1:15:10 Speaker 04 I love that.
1:15:10 Speaker 01 But I enjoyed the parts that I read. But there's a whole bunch more. Yeah, there's literally so many more. We'll post them all on our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com.
1:15:18 Speaker 04 We will, we will. Thank you again to the provider of our firsthand account.
1:15:23 Speaker 01 It's, I can't express enough thank you so much.
1:15:28 Speaker 04 So much.
1:15:28 Speaker 01 For sharing that story with us. I will cry laughing thinking about it once again.
1:15:32 Speaker 04 Oh, yes. Me too. Thank you also to Blood Mobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
1:15:39 Speaker 01 Thank you to everyone at Exactly Right, Brent and everyone, including everyone here today, and Tom, and Leanna, and Brent, and Pete, and everybody who's involved in making this possible.
1:15:49 Speaker 04 It's amazing. And thank you to you listeners for listening and watching.
1:15:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
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1:16:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:16:01 Speaker 01 We don't say that enough.
1:16:03 Speaker 04 We don't say that enough.
1:16:03 Speaker 01 But it helps us, so thank you for doing it.
1:16:05 Speaker 04 We do say that a lot.
1:16:06 Speaker 01 You're right, we do.
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1:16:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:16:12 Speaker 04 Truly, truly.
1:16:13 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:16:14 Speaker 04 Yeah. Until next time, wash your hands.
1:16:17 Speaker 01 You filthy animals.
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