Wombats are Australian marsupials who have achieved a “certain fame” thanks to a peculiarity unique in the animal kingdom: they poop in cubes. A curiosity that has been known for some time but whose mysteries we have only begun to unravel recently – to be precise in 2019, when biologist Scott Carver of the University of Georgia published a study in which he explained the physiological mechanism behind the creation of stool cubes.
Now Carver is back with another study, conducted by a University of Tasmania researcher named Kate McMahon and which reveals that diced poop is not just a habit, but a method of communication. The study was published in Journal of Zoology.
From the Ig Nobel to the nose of wombats. The 2019 study, which among other things earned Carver an Ig Nobel Prize, described the anatomical peculiarities of the wombat intestine, which allow these marsupials to shape their feces into the shape of cubes.
However, it also left a question unanswered: why do they do it? And also, a related question, why are they solitary and asocial animals that avoid any type of interaction with their own kind except when it comes to reproduction, yet they all poop in the same place, creating real public latrines?
Powerful sense of smell. Carver always suspected that behind this habit there was a form of communication, probably based on smell, but until now there was a lack of research confirming this hypothesis. Here comes Kate McMahon, a researcher and student at the University of Tasmania who began studying the anatomy of wombats beyond the intestine, to discover something about their nose. In this way he discovered that these marsupials have a particularly developed vomeronasal organ, which gives them a very powerful sense of smell.
Talking to poop. At this point, McMahon moved on to investigate the wombats’ poop, discovering that each specimen has a personalized “chemical signature” that allows its feces to be distinguished from those of others. Confirmation came when the researchers took some cubes from a latrine and moved them to another one distant from the first: the wombats spent a lot of time investigating the “foreign” poop, confused.
In short: there is a reason why wombats care so much about their excrement, and it is linked to the fact that they use it to communicate their presence and perceive that of other wombats, without needing to interact with it.
The variety of chemical substances contained in the cubes, moreover, suggests that each piece of poop contains many different information about its author: age, sex, reproductive status… There therefore remains one last mystery to be revealed: why the cubes?
