Mid-Week Mini: Wombats Poop Cubes

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk about wombat poop.

Wombat poop is cube-shaped.

That’s not a typo. It’s not clickbait. Wombat poop — the droppings of a short, stout marsupial in Australia — comes out in little cubes. If you didn’t already know this, it sounds made up. It sounds like one of those “animal facts” that your uncle tells you at Thanksgiving and you nod politely and assume he’s wrong. But this one is very real.

Wombats are nocturnal burrowers, about three feet long, with short legs and powerful claws for digging. And they’re shy creatures. If you go to a zoo or a sanctuary in Australia, you might have trouble even catching a glimpse of one. But if you don’t see the wombat, you’ll almost certainly see the evidence they leave behind. Little brown cubes.

So, why cubes? Scientists wondered this too, and for years nobody had a good answer. The theory was that it had something to do with their very long digestive process. Wombats can take up to 14 days to fully digest a meal of grass and roots, which means the food sits in their intestines for a long time. But the actual shape of the poop puzzled researchers for decades.

Finally, in 2018, a group of scientists in Georgia and Tasmania studied wombat intestines and published their findings. They discovered that the wombat’s colon isn’t uniform. The tissue has regions that are stretchy and regions that are stiffer, and as the digested matter dries out, those alternating regions mold the poop into little cubes. It’s the only animal on earth known to do this.

And here’s the kicker: wombats actually use this cube-shaped poop. They stack it. They leave piles of it on rocks and logs to mark territory and communicate with other wombats. Because the poop is flat-sided, it doesn’t roll away like round droppings would. Imagine trying to leave a note for your neighbor but the paper kept rolling down the hill. Not very effective. Cubes solve that problem.

So the next time someone tries to impress you with a weird animal fact, you’ve got a perfect one to counter with. Because as weird as it sounds — the internet says it’s true.