Sludge Watch ==> Dung Days at the Miami Zoo - the Scoop on Poop

[Maureen Reilly]

Humble dung gets its day in the sun at Miami's MetroZoo

Updated 10/23/2006 9:58 AM ET

MIAMI (AFP) — Cranes use it for courtship, hippos to mark territory, and 
frogs for camouflage. Humans mostly flush it as fast as they can.
A new exhibit at the Miami MetroZoo is set to open minds about this 
omnipresent, versatile, little loved yet practical byproduct of life on 
Earth.
It's called "The Scoop on Poop," and it's based on a book Canadian author 
and photographer Wayne Lynch about the way animals and humans use fecal 
matter.
In a series of interactive exhibits, kids and adults learn more than they 
ever dreamed there was to know about poop. The Maasai of Kenya and northern 
Tanzania use it to cover their houses. People in parts of Asia and South 
America use it as fuel or fertilizer. Animals have infinite uses for it.
You can even find out how long it would take an African elephant, one of the 
animal kingdom's most prolific poopers, to excrete the equivalent of your 
body weight.
The average time for three recent visitors: 10 hours.
"This is a cool message. We're talking about something that everybody does 
but nobody talks about," said zoo spokesman Ron McGill.
Hopefully, the focus on feces will have health benefits.
"We shouldn't be so frightened of it. If it wasn't for our aversion to poop, 
we wouldn't have so many people dying from colon cancer. People are 
frightened to do a colorectal exam," he said.
A species of Nepalese crane impresses its mate by pitching "buffalo chips" 
in the air.
A type of frog camouflages itself by changing color to look like poop.
Deer are extremely careful with their scat, controlling when fawns defecate 
and sometimes eating the results to avoid leaving signs of their presence 
for predators.
The hippopotamus does the opposite, marking its territory by quickly fanning 
its tale while defecating to "broadcast" dung across the ground.
Rhinoceros trample their turd to mark their trail with smelly footprints.
But not only animals benefit from the practical uses of poop.
Plants trick animals into helping them reproduce by growing appetizing 
fruits whose seeds are geographically disseminated when expelled in animal 
poop.
Scientists analyze feces fossils for clues about what prehistoric animals 
ate or disappeared plant species.
The exhibit even includes a touchable Coprolite, a fossilized piece of turd 
tossed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex 80 million years ago.
The scat show also makes clear that while poop can be useful, it can also be 
dangerous.
Rodent excrement is a vector for numerous diseases including the potentially 
fatal hantavirus, and human feces is toxic for certain plants.
"Fecal material can pass a lot of different diseases. That being said it's 
not something that we should paint with such a broad brush that people don't 
understand it," McGill said.
"We as adults, sometimes we tend to think, 'oh my God, this isn't something 
we should talk about, we don't want our kids exposed to that,'" he said.
"Human poop doesn't have any use to us directly as animals do ... but is a 
huge vehicle of information for our health for anything from parasites to 
cancer," he said.