Sunday, October 29, 2006 12:45:56 PM
Oh poo....
Humble dung gets its day in the sun at Miami zoo
by Randy Nieves-Ruiz
Thu Oct 26, 1:30 PM ET
Cranes use it for courtship, hippos to mark territory, and frogs for camouflage. Humans mostly flush it as fast as they can.
A new exhibit at the Miami Metro Zoo is set to open minds about this omnipresent, versatile, little loved yet practical by-product of life on Earth.
It's called "The Scoop on Poop," and it's based on a book by Canadian author and photographer Wayne Lynch about the way animals and humans use fecal matter.
In a series of interactive exhibits, kids and adults can learn more than they ever dreamed there was to know about poop.
The Masai of Kenya and northern Tanzania, for instance, use it to cover their houses. People in parts of Asia and South America use it as fuel or fertilizer. Animals have infinite uses for it.
You can even find out how long it would take an African elephant, one of the animal kingdom's most prolific poopers, to excrete the equivalent of your body weight.
The average time for three recent visitors: 10 hours.
"This is a cool message. We're talking about something that everybody does but nobody talks about," said zoo spokesman Ron McGill.
Hopefully, the focus on feces will have health benefits.
"We shouldn't be so frightened of it. If it wasn't for our aversion to poop, we wouldn't have so many people dying from colon cancer. People are frightened to do a colorectal exam," he said.
A species of Nepalese crane impresses its mate by pitching "buffalo chips" in the air.
A type of frog camouflages itself by changing color to look like poop.
Deer are extremely careful with their scat, controlling when fawns defecate and sometimes eating the results to avoid leaving signs of their presence for predators.
The hippopotamus does the opposite, marking its territory by quickly fanning its tale while defecating to "broadcast" dung across the ground.
Rhinoceroses trample their turd to mark their trail with smelly footprints.
But not only animals benefit from the practical uses of poop.
Plants trick animals into helping them reproduce by growing appetizing fruits whose seeds are geographically disseminated when expelled in animal dung.
Scientists analyze feces fossils for clues about what prehistoric animals ate or disappeared plant species.
The exhibit even includes a touchable Coprolite, a fossilized piece of fecal matter passed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex 80 million years ago.
The scat show also makes clear that while poop can be useful, it can also be dangerous.
Rodent excrement is a vector for numerous diseases including the potentially fatal hantavirus, and human feces is toxic for certain plants.
"Fecal material can pass a lot of different diseases. That being said it's not something that we should paint with such a broad brush that people don't understand it," McGill said.
"We as adults, sometimes we tend to think, 'oh my God, this isn't something we should talk about, we don't want our kids exposed to that'," he said.
"Human poop doesn't have any use to us directly as animals do but is a huge vehicle of information for our health for anything from parasites to cancer," he said.
Humble dung gets its day in the sun at Miami zoo
by Randy Nieves-Ruiz
Thu Oct 26, 1:30 PM ET
Cranes use it for courtship, hippos to mark territory, and frogs for camouflage. Humans mostly flush it as fast as they can.
A new exhibit at the Miami Metro Zoo is set to open minds about this omnipresent, versatile, little loved yet practical by-product of life on Earth.
It's called "The Scoop on Poop," and it's based on a book by Canadian author and photographer Wayne Lynch about the way animals and humans use fecal matter.
In a series of interactive exhibits, kids and adults can learn more than they ever dreamed there was to know about poop.
The Masai of Kenya and northern Tanzania, for instance, use it to cover their houses. People in parts of Asia and South America use it as fuel or fertilizer. Animals have infinite uses for it.
You can even find out how long it would take an African elephant, one of the animal kingdom's most prolific poopers, to excrete the equivalent of your body weight.
The average time for three recent visitors: 10 hours.
"This is a cool message. We're talking about something that everybody does but nobody talks about," said zoo spokesman Ron McGill.
Hopefully, the focus on feces will have health benefits.
"We shouldn't be so frightened of it. If it wasn't for our aversion to poop, we wouldn't have so many people dying from colon cancer. People are frightened to do a colorectal exam," he said.
A species of Nepalese crane impresses its mate by pitching "buffalo chips" in the air.
A type of frog camouflages itself by changing color to look like poop.
Deer are extremely careful with their scat, controlling when fawns defecate and sometimes eating the results to avoid leaving signs of their presence for predators.
The hippopotamus does the opposite, marking its territory by quickly fanning its tale while defecating to "broadcast" dung across the ground.
Rhinoceroses trample their turd to mark their trail with smelly footprints.
But not only animals benefit from the practical uses of poop.
Plants trick animals into helping them reproduce by growing appetizing fruits whose seeds are geographically disseminated when expelled in animal dung.
Scientists analyze feces fossils for clues about what prehistoric animals ate or disappeared plant species.
The exhibit even includes a touchable Coprolite, a fossilized piece of fecal matter passed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex 80 million years ago.
The scat show also makes clear that while poop can be useful, it can also be dangerous.
Rodent excrement is a vector for numerous diseases including the potentially fatal hantavirus, and human feces is toxic for certain plants.
"Fecal material can pass a lot of different diseases. That being said it's not something that we should paint with such a broad brush that people don't understand it," McGill said.
"We as adults, sometimes we tend to think, 'oh my God, this isn't something we should talk about, we don't want our kids exposed to that'," he said.
"Human poop doesn't have any use to us directly as animals do but is a huge vehicle of information for our health for anything from parasites to cancer," he said.
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