December 21st, 2020
Welcome to the Poop Olympics! A comparative meta-analysis of fecal dimensionailty across species. Today's competition comprises 215 mammal species from 9 taxonomic orders. With 83 competitors from Africa, 29 from Europe, and 104 from the Americas, it's sure to be a great day for fecal athleticism folks!
Our judges today will be giving out gold, silver, and bronze medals for 3 different competitions:
1. Longest poop
2. Longest poop as a percentage of body length
3. Longest poop in proportion to body mass
In addition to the phylum-wide games, competitions will also run within taxonomic orders. Carnivores (Carnivora), hooved mammals (Ungulata), and rodents (Rodentia) will compete within their own orders. However, because we have such a low number of competitors from the orders Marsupiala, Pinnipedia, Primata, Xenarthra, Insectivora, and Lagomorpha, those contestants will be merged into one category called "Small Mammals."
We'll start off with our first competition - Longest poop. Let's head to our sports analyst, Kat, for our predictions.
Thanks Kat. These two graphs compare poop length on the y-axis, and body mass and body length respectively on the x-axis, for all of our competitors. As you can see there is a strong correlation between both poop size and body mass, and poop size and body length. Here at Poop Olympics Labs™, we're expecting the medals for largest poop to go to today's biggest competitors. It's sure to be a rough competition for our rodent and small mammal competitors! Back to you, Kat.
Thanks Kat, we're back just in time for the judges to render their verdicts. Let's see who our champions will be today...
Wow wee, what a rush! Those sure were some stupendous poops. And what an underdog story for our champion medalist today, the American Bison! Less than a sixth the weight and half the length of the African Elephant, yet its winning turd was nearly twice as long! A trumendous display of athleticism, to be sure.
Next up, our second category today, longest poop as a percentage of body length! While our judges finish their deliberations, let's head over to our Analyst again for a quick briefing of what we can expect, Kat?
Thanks Kat. As you can see here, the trend for largest poop in relation to body length is inverse compared to our last competition. Though the trend is less noticable than last time, smaller mammals are expected to have a slight advantage in this round. The only competition where this may not be the case is in Ungulata, where we don't see this trend as noticeably. In fact-
Sorry Kat, I'll have to cut you off there. It looks like our judges have finished tallying their results sooner than we anticipated! Let's see what they have to say this round...
Incredible work on the part of the lesser bushbaby! If an average human male had the same poop to body length ratio, his poops would be about the length of a common garter snake. Now that's stamina!
Our final category for this evening is largest poop length to body mass ratio! A coveted title- lets go to Kat to see what we can expect
Thanks Kat. Our final round is expected to be a blow-out for our low-mass critters. As you can see here, it will be nearly impossible for big mammals to win this section. Bad news for any of our megafauna who underpreformed in the first round. Back to you Kat.
Thanks Kat, and- oh! It looks like the judges are ready to give out the final awards of the night
What an incredible day for feces-based competetive sports. The pygmy shrew really blew us out of the water today. Did you know that if a pygmy shrew were the weight of an average North American adult, and its poop size scaled up accordingly, it would produce over one tenth of a kilometer of poop every time it used the bathroom? What an athlete!
With the games finally finished up, lets take a look at the day's top champions:
And that just about does it for us here at the 2020 Poop Olympics! Join us again next time when we identify the fecal champions of another phylum. Good night, and don't forget to take your daily dose of dietary fiber!
Someone asked a question on reddit about which animal had the biggest poop, and I became so curious that I spent a week making this. Unfortunately, mass-sourcing data about animal poop is actually really hard! Poop mass is not, as I was expecting it to be, something there is a plethora of information about in the scientific literature. Poop length was really the only metric I could find, and it's far from a perfect one since every poop is a different shape. But, I spent way to much time working on this to not post it, so, you know, here it is.
Hopefully, some day soon I'll make a volume two on a different phylum, though that hinges on me finding articles that compare the fecal dimensionality of many different species. Considering how hard it was to find for mammals, my hopes aren't high. If you know of such an article, you can email it to me here and get a shoutout in the next post when it eventually comes out!
Extended data is available here, raw data is available here, and if you're an extra big nerd, you can check out the R scripts I used to make everything here.
1. Poop lenth data: Chame, M., 2003. Terrestrial mammal feces: a morphometric summary and description. Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 98(suppl 1), pp.71-94.
2. Species mass and length data: Animal Diversity Web: https://animaldiversity.org/
3. Species mass and length data: Encyclopedia of Life: https://eol.org/
4. Rodent length data: Hayssen, V., 2008. Patterns of Body and Tail Length and Body Mass in Sciuridae. Journal of Mammalogy, 89(4), pp.852-873.
5. Ungulate length data: Ultimate Ungulate: http://ultimateungulate.com/
Species icons: https://animaldiversity.org/
Species icons: https://wikimedia.org/
Scat wallpaper: Chame, M., 2003
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