Wombat poop: Scientists reveal mystery behind cube-shaped droppings | Hacker News Reader

Wombat poop: Scientists reveal mystery behind cube-shaped droppings

bbc.com

If you make it to Hobart, Tasmania, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has an amazing art installation which is a faux digestive tract, rigged up on controller logic. Its poop element is crying out to be modded for cubic wombat poop (they feed it daily, the same as whats on offer in the gallery restaurant. Somehow, it smelt cheesy when I was there)

Wombats are in trouble. There is a huge problem with Mange, and the populations are in stress. If you find any charity which supports Wombats, fund them. They need help.

Cubic poo forever!

I feel the article would benefit from pictures of wild wombat droppings in their natural state.

Fortunately, we have a few on the Vombatus ursinus page [1]. (I work at GBIF.)

> Wombats are in trouble.

It's not direct help as such, but better data can show if the real help is really helping. The nicest poo picture is [2], which is from the iNaturalist project[3], where non-biologists can submit observations of wildlife. Other wombat observations are from Questagame [4], an Australian app which gamifies observing wildlife.

The data can then be used by biologists to inform their analysis. For example, here [5] are all 69,776 records of wombats we have in TSV format.

[1] https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/gallery?taxon_key=2440301

[2] https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1841291586

[3] https://www.iNaturalist.org/

[4] https://questagame.com/

[5] https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download/0006766-18110811510...

(Edit: I should add we're looking for an additional developer, see the gbif.org homepage.)

There's a wildlife park just out of Bicheno that raise and release orphaned Wombats.

They also have an insurance colony and breeding program for devils.

I went to asbestos n.p. in the late eighties at dusk. The wombats were lik: "wot you starin' at, short arse" everywhere. Loved that visit. They really are very engaging. Watched one blithly re-digging it's warren kicking dirt over another's muzzle "see what I have to put up with? See? see?"

I know we shouldn't anthropomorphise, but sometimes it's hard not to.

What is really funny is how as a pup they are super friendly, enjoy cuddles and a good belly scratch. Then at 18 months or so they mature and revert to being completely wild and can be very aggresive.

Teenagers.

> but then in the final 8% a varied elasticity of the walls meant the poop would take shape as separated cubes

This explains absolutely nothing! WHY does the varied elasticity of the walls make the poop cubic?

front/end is easy, the nuggets just bump in to each other. Sides I guess are done by having more elasticity where the corners shall be. This way the filled tube naturally expands to be square.

I now think I know the how, but why? They stack it? You could stack cylinder shapes...

The article also said:

> The shape helps it stop rolling away.

time for Mojang to add the Wombat to Minecraft

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18483689

It's not a dupe by HN's standard because that submission didn't get significant attention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

So wombats make square poops because they have square butts. Got it.

No, they don’t

> [...] in the final 8% a varied elasticity of the walls meant the poop would take shape as separated cubes.

Some bits of the colon walls stretch more than others to mould the poop into a square shape as it goes through. Sounds like they were stretching into a square shape to me.

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