How do wombats make cubed poo?

For inexpensive factory production of sugar cubes, broth cubes and the like...yum!

Wouldn’t that be an extension of their territory rather?

> they poop in high up places

I've a wombat living on my property. The elevation we're talking about is only 20mm or so, in my experience. Most often it seems to be perched on an exposed tree root. I've heard it explained to me that they 'back up' to where they do it, so it's not as though they clamber up onto something.

That said, once I had a squared sawn log resting on an angle and it had wombat poo on it after a few nights and was about 300mm or so off the ground. The log would've been just manageable for a ground-hugging wombat to reverse up.

Yes, as cmroanirgo notes, they're renowned for this, and sometimes it can be quite amazing to 'spot the poo' after you've left some object out for only a day or two. I see them regularly on 50mm wide poly (irrigation) pipe - the accuracy of placement is astounding.

Wombats are territorial, and very regular in their nightly movements. The cubic poo may be in part a simple consequence of their body shape (squat, narrow, long - evolved to wiggle into tight holes leaving only their impenetrable back plate exposed to would-be predators through the day), or, as you observe, assisting in perching scat with less risk of it being moved.

As I understand it, the extra height allows for other animals to more easily detect (by smell, I'm guessing, but may be visual as well) their presence in the area - presumably with the intent that those other animals keep away.

Maybe the cube shape is better for the intestines to effectively absorb water from the dry mass. Although this would require an explanation why a cube and not a very flat tube.

Prof. Hu has a delightful pop-science book about animal-inspired engineering called "How to walk on water and climb up walls."

> NOTE: This the SECOND Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Patricia Yang and David Hu. They and two other colleagues shared the 2015 Ig Nobel Physics Prize, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds)

https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/the-2019-winners/

They received it on Thursday and wore Wombat costumes to match... right after someone else received one for the amount of saliva produced by small children per day

It's answered in the linked abstract:

"...derived from veterinary euthanized individuals following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania, Australia"

Correct. At least in physics, there's no paper. The abstract is what's submitted to the conference, and gets published before the conference begins. Peer review is limited to deciding whether your talk gets into the conference schedule or not, slotted into a different division of the conference, or perhaps to a poster session.

You could contact the author and see if they have a preprint or something to share.

The intent is to provide an outlet for "lesser" stature work, student projects, or preliminary results en route to writing a full paper. I was a physics student 25 years ago, and there was an informal culture of "everybody gets to publish." You were pretty much guaranteed a slot at one of the conferences, even if it was a poster session in a dark hallway alongside the guys who were proving that quantum mechanics was a hoax. That way, nobody could say, "they refused to publish me." And the field was never so crowded that there wasn't room for a few of those abstracts.

How it should be done in the contemporary era is of course an open question. ;-)