98 Fun Facts About Poop

About three-quarters of fresh human faeces is made of what?

Water: fresh stool is about 75% water, and the longer it sits in the colon, the more of that water the body draws back out, which is why a stool that lingers comes out hard and dry.

What gives faeces its usual brown colour?

Bile pigments from the liver: bilirubin, a leftover of worn-out red blood cells that the liver sends out in bile, is converted in the gut into the brown compound stercobilin.

What is the medical chart that sorts human faeces into seven types by shape called?

The Bristol stool scale was devised at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in 1997, and it works because the shape tracks how long the waste has spent in the colon.

On the seven-type stool chart doctors use, types 1 and 2 point to what?

Constipation: types 1 and 2 are hard lumps that have sat longest in the colon, while types 6 and 7, at the other end of the chart, are diarrhoea.

Doctors' stool chart calls the ideal type 'like a sausage or' which animal?

Snake: the chart's wording for type 4 is 'like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft', and types 3 and 4 count as ideal because they pass easily without excess liquid.

What is a newborn baby's first stool called?

Meconium is sticky like tar and almost odourless, because it is made of what the baby swallowed in the womb, such as amniotic fluid, mucus and shed cells, and not of digested milk.

Skatole, the compound chiefly behind the smell of faeces, smells like which flower once heavily diluted?

Jasmine: skatole occurs naturally in jasmine and orange blossom, so perfumers add traces of it to floral scents, and it is even approved as a food flavouring.

Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?

The wombat: the team that won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize found the corners form in the last stretch of its intestine, where stiff and stretchy bands of the gut wall alternate.

Why is the cube shape of certain marsupial droppings thought to be useful?

They stack and don't roll: the animal arranges its droppings in the open to mark its territory and attract mates, so a shape that stays where it is put is an advantage.

How often do three-toed sloths climb down from the trees to defecate?

About once a week: the sloth climbs down, digs a hole and covers it over, a slow trip to the ground that leaves it open to predators and that biologists still argue about.

Kopi luwak, among the world's priciest coffees, uses beans that have passed through which animal?

The Asian palm civet: it eats ripe coffee cherries and passes the beans whole, and rising demand has since led producers to keep civets in battery cages and force-feed them.

Kopi luwak originated in the coffee plantations of which country?

Indonesia: on Java's Dutch colonial plantations in the 19th century, farmers began brewing the beans they gathered from animal droppings, and Indonesian islands still produce most of it.

A male Onthophagus taurus dung beetle can pull 1,141 times its weight, like a person lifting six full what?

Double-decker buses: the beetle's strength is for fighting, not hauling dung, as rival males lock horns underground and try to shove each other out of a female's burrow.

The African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus is the only insect known to navigate by what?

Ancient Egyptians saw the ball-rolling scarab as the god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky.

Which country ran a two-decade project from 1965 to import dung beetles to deal with cattle dung?

Australia: its native beetles had evolved on the dry pellets of kangaroos and left wet cattle pats to smother pasture and breed flies, so scientists shipped in species from Africa and Europe.

Much of the white sand on tropical beaches, such as Hawaii's, is the excrement of which fish?

Parrotfish: they scrape algae off dead coral with beak-like teeth, grind up the rock they swallow, and pass it as fine sand, in big species hundreds of pounds a year.

Ecologists sort dung beetles by habit into rollers, tunnellers and which third group?

Dwellers: they neither roll dung away nor bury it, and simply live inside the pat; among rollers, it is usually the male that pushes the ball while the female rides or follows.

What is the scientific term for fossilised faeces?

Coprolite: the name joins the Greek for dung and stone, and such fossils are prized because they hold direct evidence of what extinct animals ate.

Which fossil hunter's observation of stones inside ichthyosaur skeletons revealed them to be fossilised dung?

Mary Anning noticed as early as 1824 that the odd stones lying inside her Lyme Regis ichthyosaurs held fish bones and scales when broken open, the clue that they had once been meals.

The Lloyds Bank specimen, a famous fossilised human stool, was found in 1972 in which English city?

York: it lay beneath the future site of a Lloyds Bank branch, in the Viking town of Jórvík, and its hundreds of parasite eggs show that its maker was riddled with worms.

What happened to the famous Viking-age Lloyds Bank specimen in 2003?

It was dropped and broke: the specimen snapped into three pieces while being shown to visitors and had to be pieced back together, years after an expert called it as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels.

Guano, prized as fertiliser, is the accumulated droppings of which animals?

Seabirds and bats: their droppings are so rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium that 19th-century farmers paid to have them shipped across oceans.

Which Pacific atoll did a sea captain claim for the United States in 1859 under the Guano Islands Act?

Midway: the Act let any American who found guano on an unclaimed island take it for the United States, yet nobody is recorded as ever mining guano on Midway.

Which South American country's guano trade dominated the 19th century, centred on the Chincha Islands?

Peru: the islands were so valuable that Spain seized them in 1864, starting a war, and by the end of that decade their richest deposits were close to worked out.

What did the Haber-Bosch process do to the guano trade after 1910?

Collapsed demand for it: the process makes fertiliser from the nitrogen in air, so farmers no longer needed droppings dug from distant islands and shipped across oceans.

Rabbits produce and eat soft nutrient packets from their gut called what?

Cecotropes are made in the cecum, where microbes ferment fibre into vitamins and amino acids, and the rabbit eats them as they emerge so those nutrients get a second trip through the gut.

Ambergris, the perfume fixative once worth a fortune, forms in the digestive system of which animal?

The sperm whale: ambergris is thought to form in its gut around the sharp beaks of the squid it eats, and though fresh lumps smell faecal, years at sea turn the scent sweet.

Whale faeces help fight climate change by fertilising what?

Phytoplankton: whales feed in the depths and release their plumes at the surface, and the iron and nitrogen in them feed blooms of these tiny plants, which take up carbon dioxide.

In Tudor England, what were the men who emptied cesspits at night called?

Gong farmers could work only at night and had to cart the waste beyond the town boundary, but the pay was good: sixpence a day at Hampton Court under Elizabeth I.

Which crisis of the hot summer of 1858 pushed Parliament to pay for London's modern sewers?

The Great Stink: The Times said Parliament was 'all but compelled to legislate' by sheer stench, and Joseph Bazalgette's sewers went on to end the city's cholera outbreaks.

'Night soil' is a historical euphemism for what?

Human excrement: the name comes from the hours it was collected, since privies could be emptied only after dark, and the loads were often sold on to farmers as fertiliser.

Manure is used in agriculture mainly to add what to soil?

Organic matter: it feeds the microbes and fungi that make soil fertile, which is why a cover crop ploughed back into a field also counts as a manure though no dung is involved.

Purpose-made toilet paper was being mass-produced in which country by the 14th century?

China: an Arab traveller in 851 noted with surprise that the Chinese wiped with paper instead of washing, and in the 14th century one province alone made ten million packets a year.

America's first commercial toilet paper, sold by Joseph Gayetty from 1857, was marketed as a remedy for what?

Piles: Gayetty's Medicated Paper, treated with aloe and watermarked with his name on every sheet, was sold as a haemorrhoid cure, and at least one medical society attacked him as a quack.

Seth Wheeler's 1883 patent gave toilet paper which now-familiar form?

A perforated roll: Wheeler patented holders for it too, and most of his drawings show the paper hanging over the front, which one side of the over-or-under argument still cites.

Faecal transplants, roughly 85 to 90% effective, are mainly used against recurring gut infections of which bacterium?

C. difficile: the infection takes hold when antibiotics clear out the gut's normal microbes, and a healthy donor's stool puts them back, often after repeated drug courses have failed.

Which African animal spins its tail like a propeller as it defecates, flinging dung over a wide area?

The hippopotamus: the habit is called muck-spreading and happens in rivers as well as on land; it was long said to mark a male's territory, though some zoologists now doubt that.

Everyone Poops, the 1977 picture book, was first published in which country?

Japan: Tarō Gomi's Minna Unchi reached American shops only in 1993, sixteen years after it came out at home, and became the best-known title of its small American publisher.

Fossilised dung belongs to which class of fossils?

Trace fossils: like footprints and burrows, fossil dung records what an animal did, in this case what it ate, and not the shape of its body.

Preventing the spread of disease by the faecal-oral route is the main goal of what?

Sanitation: toilets, sewers and treatment keep human waste out of drinking supplies and food, which is how diseases such as cholera and typhoid are stopped from passing from one gut to the next.

What colour is stool likely to turn when food rushes through the gut too fast for digestion to finish?

Green: the gut's contents are that colour early in their journey and turn brown only on the slow trip through the bowel, so when everything is rushed, as in diarrhoea, they arrive unchanged.

Brown stains of droppings on sea ice, seen by satellite, revealed unknown colonies of which penguin?

Emperor: these penguins breed on sea ice in places too remote and cold to survey from the ground, so scientists look for the stains instead, and a 2020 sweep of the coast took the known colonies to 61.

Thomas Crapper, wrongly credited with inventing the flush toilet, in fact made his living as what?

A plumber: Crapper's London firm sold and improved toilets and opened the first bathroom showroom, but he held no patent for the flush itself, and the slang verb was in print in 1846, when he was a child.

The word 'faeces' is the plural of the Latin faex, meaning what?

Dregs: Latin faex was the sediment left at the bottom of a wine cask, and English used the word that way for two centuries before it came to mean excrement in the 1630s.

Which Oxford geologist showed in 1829 that the odd stones found inside fossil sea reptiles were ancient dung?

William Buckland was so taken with fossil dung that he had a table top inlaid with polished pieces of it, and he claimed to have eaten his way through the animal kingdom.

A Thai coffee, among the world's priciest, is made from beans that have passed through which animal?

Elephants: the coffee, sold as Black Ivory, uses beans that keepers recover from the dung, and the long fermentation in the animal's gut is credited with a smoother, less bitter cup.

Victorian 'pure finders' scoured the streets for which animal's droppings to sell to leather tanners?

Dogs: tanners worked the dung, known in the trade as pure, into hides to soften them, and Henry Mayhew recorded the London poor who made a living by gathering it.

Ancient Egyptians linked the dung-rolling scarab to Khepri, god of what?

The rising sun: a beetle pushing its ball of dung looked like the god rolling the sun across the sky, and the young beetles that crawled out of buried balls seemed, like each dawn, to be born from nothing.

A ship's poop deck takes its name from the Latin word puppis, meaning which part of a vessel?

The stern is the rear of a ship, and the poop deck formed the roof of the cabin built there. The word reached English through the French poupe.

In The Martian, stranded astronaut Mark Watney fertilises which crop with his crew's bodily waste?

Potatoes keep Watney alive on Mars: he plants them in Martian soil mixed with the crew's waste. Real ones were grown on a sound stage beside the set.

Which stomach remedy is known for harmlessly turning the tongue and stool black?

Pepto-Bismol contains bismuth, which meets traces of sulphur in saliva and the gut to form black bismuth sulphide. The stain is temporary.

Which animated series introduced Mr Hankey, a talking piece of Christmas faeces, in a 1997 episode?

South Park made Mr Hankey the star of its first Christmas episode, which was also its first musical. It drew the show's biggest audience to that date.

In ancient Roman public latrines, people are said to have wiped with which shared item on a stick?

A sea sponge fixed to a wooden stick, the xylospongium, is traditionally thought to have been rinsed in vinegar or water between users. Recent research suggests it may really have been a toilet brush.

Italian artist Piero Manzoni priced 90 tins labelled as his own faeces in 1961 by weight in which commodity?

Gold set the price: each 30-gram tin was to cost its own weight in the metal, about $37 at the time. One tin sold for €275,000 in 2016.

Which Austrian composer filled letters to his cousin in 1777 with crude jokes about defecation?

Mozart also worked toilet humour into light-hearted canons, and many scholars put it down to the banter of his family and his time.

In the film The Help, maid Minny Jackson takes revenge on Hilly Holbrook with which baked dessert?

A chocolate pie carries Minny's revenge: after Hilly eats two slices, Minny reveals she baked her own faeces into it. Octavia Spencer won an Oscar in the role.

Which Star Trek actor voiced the smiling poop emoji in the 2017 animated film The Emoji Movie?

Patrick Stewart voiced the well-mannered character seven years after the emoji itself was added to Unicode in 2010.

Travellers' diarrhoea caught in Mexico is nicknamed the revenge of which ruler toppled by Spain?

Montezuma was the Aztec ruler overthrown by Hernán Cortés, and the joke has him getting even with visitors. Elsewhere the same illness is called Bali belly.

Typhoid Mary, who shed typhoid bacteria without ever falling ill, infected dozens in 1900s New York through which job?

A cook for wealthy New York families, Mary Mallon shed the bacteria in her faeces without ever falling ill. She was the first such symptom-free carrier identified in the US.

Which sewage-borne disease causes pale diarrhoea named after the cloudy liquid left from rinsing rice?

Cholera spreads when that highly liquid stool taints what other people drink. The diarrhoea may also have a fishy odour.

Pregnant women are told not to clean cat litter trays because of which parasite shed in cat faeces?

Toxoplasma can reproduce sexually only inside cats, which pass its cysts in their droppings. An infection caught during pregnancy can harm the unborn child.

Hikers who drink from streams risk which gut parasite, whose illness is nicknamed beaver fever?

Giardia causes diarrhoea that can drag on for six weeks or longer if untreated, yet despite the nickname only about 15% of sufferers run a fever.

Which gut bacterium, found in healthy people's faeces in 1885, do labs use as a sign of sewage pollution?

E. coli is named after Theodor Escherich, the paediatrician who discovered it. It lives in the lower intestine and survives only briefly outside the body.

Health agencies test city sewage to track which virus, spread mainly through infected faeces?

Polio often causes no severe symptoms, so sewage sampling can reveal the virus circulating before anyone is paralysed.

Which physician traced an 1854 outbreak in London's Soho to a street pump beside a leaking cesspit?

John Snow mapped the deaths around the Broad Street pump, and the parish took off its handle. The well was later found to lie three feet from an old cesspit.

Which bodily response, set off by eating, creates the urge to visit the toilet soon after a meal?

Gastrocolic reflex is the term: eating signals the colon to move its contents along and make room. It can overreact in people with irritable bowel syndrome.

Which wave of muscle contractions moves food through the gut and finally pushes faeces out?

Peristalsis works by involuntary rings of muscle tightening in sequence. In the large intestine, mass contractions one to three times a day drive the contents onward.

Which final straight section of the large intestine stores faeces until they are passed?

The rectum has stretch receptors in its walls, and as it fills they trigger the urge to go.

Ancient Rome's main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, emptied the city's waste into which river?

The Tiber received Rome's effluent through a sewer begun, by tradition, around 600 BC. Its name means 'Greatest Sewer', and parts of it are in use to this day.

Which godson of Elizabeth I described his flushing toilet, the Ajax, in a book of 1596?

John Harington named it with a pun on 'a jakes', the slang of his day for a toilet. The book doubled as a political allegory attacking the monarchy.

The S-shaped pipe bend that Alexander Cumming patented in 1775 stops what from rising into a home?

Bad smells are held back by the plug of liquid that always sits in the bend. Cumming, a Scottish watchmaker, was the first to patent a flush toilet design.

What was the name for a medieval castle toilet, often a simple hole emptying into the moat?

Garderobe means a place to guard robes: clothes are thought to have been hung in the toilet shaft so that the ammonia fumes would kill fleas.

Which warning cry did residents of old Edinburgh shout before tipping slops from an upstairs window?

Gardyloo is a warped version of a French phrase meaning roughly 'watch out', and it first appears in Edinburgh's burgh records in 1662.

Which Tudor court office involved attending the king on the toilet and grew into a powerful post?

Groom of the Stool was prized for that intimacy: the holder heard the king's secrets, and under Henry VII he helped set national fiscal policy.

Which British king collapsed and died in 1760 moments after going alone to his close stool?

George II had risen at six as usual; a few minutes later his valet heard a loud crash and found the king on the floor.

Which retailer's mail-order catalogue commonly served as toilet paper in rural American outhouses?

Sears Roebuck catalogues, like Montgomery Ward's, gave outhouse visitors something to read as well as something to wipe with.

Which door cut-out shape, popularised by cartoonists, became the symbol of the American outhouse?

A crescent moon is claimed by some authors to have told men's and women's privies apart in colonial times, but the story has a questionable basis in fact.

The bidet takes its name from a French word for which animal, because the user sits astride it?

A pony is what bidet means in French, and the old verb bider meant to trot. The user straddles the basin the way a rider sits a small horse.

In which 1994 comedy does Lloyd spike Harry's drink with laxatives in revenge for a stolen date?

Dumb and Dumber follows the prank with a broken toilet at the date's house. Jeff Daniels plays the unlucky Harry opposite Jim Carrey's Lloyd.

In which 1980 comedy is a Baby Ruth bar floating at a pool party mistaken for faeces?

Caddyshack was directed by Harold Ramis, and Bill Murray plays the eccentric greenskeeper charged with ridding the club of a gopher.

Professor Poopypants is the villain of the fourth book in which children's book series?

Captain Underpants faces him in a book published in 2000, after the professor takes a job as a science teacher at Jerome Horwitz Elementary.

In a 1989 German picture book, which small animal sets out to find who pooped on its head?

A mole just emerging from his hole is the victim. The book, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch, was soon translated and became an international success.

The Great Mighty Poo, an opera-singing boss made of faeces, appears in which 2001 Nintendo 64 game?

Conker's Bad Fur Day gave the boss a song written to show off its performer's operatic training, and it was recorded in a single afternoon.

Modern Toilet, a restaurant chain that serves meals in miniature toilet bowls, began on which island?

Taiwan got the chain after its owner's first shop, which sold swirls of ice cream in mini toilets, proved a hit. Diners sit on real, non-working toilets.

Which American talk-show host's joke about a shortage set off a toilet paper buying panic in 1973?

Johnny Carson made the gag on Tonight that December; viewers believed it, and shops and manufacturers had to ration supplies until the panic ended.

Which billionaire drank water made from sewage sludge to promote a waste-treatment machine, the Omni Processor?

Bill Gates sipped the output of the Omni Processor on camera: the machine treats sewage sludge and yields water clean enough to drink.

NASA's 2016 Space Poop Challenge sought new ways to handle an astronaut's waste inside what?

A spacesuit worn for up to 144 hours straight was the brief: NASA asked for fecal and urine systems for the crew's launch and entry suits.

In which German city did about sixty nobles die in 1184 when a floor gave way above a latrine cesspit?

Erfurt was hosting a court day held by King Henry VI, who survived unharmed. Some of the guests drowned in the waste below.

Which US city has sold its treated sewage sludge as a branded fertiliser since 1926?

Milwaukee sells it as Milorganite, a name squeezed from the city's own, and first pitched the pellets at golf courses, turf farms and flower growers.

In Rabelais's Gargantua, the giant declares which bird's downy neck the best thing to wipe with?

A goose wins after Gargantua investigates a long list of rivals and dismisses paper as ineffective for the job.

Black, tarry stools, which doctors call melena, usually point to bleeding in which part of the body?

The upper gut is the usual source, most often a peptic ulcer: digestive enzymes and gut bacteria alter the blood and turn it black on the way down.

An Egyptian papyrus of around 1850 BC gives a recipe to prevent pregnancy using which reptile's dung?

A crocodile supplied the dung. The recipe is usually retold as a pessary, though some scholars read it as dung that was burned or sprinkled instead.

Which Spanish region's nativity scenes traditionally include a caganer, a figurine caught defecating?

Catalonia's caganer is traditionally a peasant in a red cap with his trousers down, and he is believed to have joined the manger scene by about 1700.

A 130-tonne fatberg of congealed grease and wet wipes was found in 2017 beneath which London district?

Whitechapel's monster stretched more than 250 metres. Most of it was destroyed or turned into biodiesel, but a dried section went on show at the Museum of London.

Which Great Lakes city reversed a river's flow in 1900 to keep sewage out of the drinking supply?

Chicago feared that sewage would reach its offshore intakes in Lake Michigan, so a new canal turned the river to flow away from the lake.

Governments once collected manure to make saltpetre, a key ingredient of which explosive?

Gunpowder needed saltpetre, so workers buried dung in prepared beds, kept them watered, and gathered the crystals that came out at the surface.

Which psychoanalyst argued that toilet training shapes personality during the so-called anal stage?

Sigmund Freud placed the stage between about 18 months and three years of age, the second of five in his theory of psychosexual development.

Loperamide, a drug that slows the gut's contractions to stop diarrhoea, is best known by which brand name?

Imodium was launched by Janssen in 1973. The drug is an opioid, but at normal doses it does not cross from the blood into the brain.