It's time to say something bad about something. Saving animals' poop is necessary to save them. If a scientist collects a bear in the woods, where will it be kept? The poop ark!
The Poop Ark is a place of functional beauty that preserves droppings, chips, turds, pies, frass, scat, and dung from the whole animal kingdom waiting to be probed and studied. The world's most comprehensive collection of preserved poo could be checked out by scientists. The visitor log would read like a who's who of biological science, and its walls would be smooth and cool. There would be a museum collection, library, time capsule, and monument.
The Poop Ark is only my pipe dream. We need to build it soon. As more of Earth's animals drop their species, its potential collection decreases.
There is more to poop than just being flushed. In her book, Zeldovich describes how Japanese farmers once paid for human feces to fertilize fields, or risked jail time to steal it. Our poop can be used to track disease outbreaks, quantify pollutants, learn about our ancient ancestors, and even treat diseases.
Boston residents who completed OpenBiome's rigorous screening for fecal transplant donors could earn as much as $13,000 annually from their high-quality outputs, which the company used to create treatments for people suffering from persistent gut infections. More than 1,250 hospitals and clinics across the US received fecal microbiota transplantation treatments from the company in the year 2020.
Scientists value animal poops as a window into an animal's identity, diet, movements, stress state, sex, maturity, reproduction, habits, predator, and health. No other specimen can tell us anything about its creator. In a recently published paper, researchers found that the stools of males and females were different. Karen DeMatteo used scat samples from animals to identify the best places to build wildlife corridors in northeastern Argentina.
You can learn a lot from fecal samples. One student is working on an improved method to extract parasites from buffalo chips, and another is using feces to compare stress levels between wild, zoo, and public engagement cheetahs.
whale researchers must try to get information from a giant whale that is traveling vast distances unseen through an opaque and often dangerous environment. The study of live whales is very much the study of their poo since marine mammal protection laws prohibit harassment, hunting, capturing, collecting, or killing whales. Matthew Savoca is a marine ecologist who studies whale poop and recently published research in Nature showing that baleen whales poop up to three times more than we thought.
It needs to be saved because it cannot be flushed into the earth. One million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, more than ever before in human history, according to a press release from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment.
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