One thing I can say for sure is that I really know my
s**t. Scat, that is (get your mind out
of the gutter). Scat, of course, is
just another of the many words used for bowel movements. Now, if you want to get really technical,
there are some very specific terms to be applied. For instance, technically, only humans
produce feces, though the term fecal is used across many species with the same
understanding.
Birds
and bats produce guano. Guano is white because of uric acid. Wildlife waste is generally qualified as
scat. Insects produce frass. I spent one glorious spring working as a
frassologist, collecting, weighing, and measuring the little packages that fell
from the trees in our survey plots in order to identify the insects that were
being eaten by the birds in our study.
Can you believe I left that job to become a park naturalist?
If an
animal eats its own waste, this is termed being coprophagic. When rabbits and guinea pigs do it, it is an
efficient way to process cellulose. When
dogs do it, it’s just gross.
When I
studied veterinary technology, I learned to grade number two but, oddly, it was
on a scale from one to five. A one is
totally liquid (hmmm…) and a five is completely solid.
By the
shape, placement, and content, you can generally tell what species left
it. For instance, foxes tend to leave
theirs on logs but I don’t know why. The
picture above is from a turkey. A
male. That’s easy to determine by the “J”
shape and remembered by many of us as being eliminated by jakes. I could explain why, but I doubt anyone but
me and a handful of turkey biologists really care.
Fossilized
dung is a coprolite. Paleofeces are
fossilized people poop. And, now,
writing about this is getting really old…
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