By Tracy F. Seelye, Express editor
editor@whitmanhansonexpress.com
HANSON – Birds do it, bees do it. Mammals and reptiles, amphibians, insects, fish, and birds do it.
In some areas of the oceans, entire beaches are made up of the result of fish having done it. Ants and ladybugs fight over whether aphids should even get the chance to do it – and it seems butterflies are the only creature on earth that don’t do it.
Poop happens all the time and everywhere, and it seems no one likes to talk about it more than kids.
Except, maybe Susie Maguire.
A native of London who grew up in Rockford, Ill., and Pittsburgh, Pa., the eldest girl in a family of seven children with five younger siblings, she had learned a thing about kids – and poop – over her lifetime. She now lives in southern Netherlands and takes her online Poop Museum on the road to present her educational and entertaining program for kids.
Her large family, she said, was the source of her initial interest in her subject matter.
“Constantly, there was just poop, poop, it was just funny in our house,” she said after her hour-long presentation on how excrement figures into everything from digestion and cleansing the body to marking territory, showing off for prospective mates and even – in some species – nourishing their young. “I’ve always had a very lavatorial sense of humor and, during COVID, I was doing programs online for children and mucking around with my nephew – doing his normal, poopy, lavatorial thing – and I thought, ‘I should make up a poop museum.’”
A lifelong educator, Maguire, who has lived “all over the world” brings a world of poop to her young fans.
“I love [their] energy and enthusiasm for the subject,” she said.
Her program included a taste sample of “honey dew” honey made with the sweet-tasting poop of aphids, and a whiff of elephant poop, which smells like grass, she said, because that is what it is almost entirely composed of, and a sheet of paper to take home made from elephant dung. The children also received a certificate designating them as official members of “The Poo Crew” possessing “profound poo knowledge” of the subject, after the program.
Maguire worked her way through the animal kingdom – from the tiny aphid, daintily defecating a sweet-tasting bubble that ants covet, to the emphatic “poop tornado” emitted by the hippopotamus and spread with the aid of its propellering tail to ward of threats and impress females – using stuffed toys, photos and videos to illustrate her talk.
“My name is Susie, and I just absolutely love the poo, anybody else?” she said as youngsters’ hands went up. Her mission: to convince those who did not raise their hands that “poop is very spectacularly awesome.”
“The interesting thing about poop is that it is not just brown and stinky,” she said. “Sometimes it’s black, sometimes it’s white, sometimes it’s orange, sometimes it’s yellow, sometimes it’s pink, sometimes it’s red, sometimes it’s blue, sometimes it’s purple, sometimes it’s green – there’s lots and lots of colors of poop in the world. Not only does it come in different colors, there is poop that is sweet and tasty.”
To the delight of her young audience, and to the discomfort of some of their parents she discussed the scatological habits of dozens of species, including humans.
Some highlights:
- Snails can poop all the colors of the rainbow. “They basically poop whatever color they eat,” Maguire said, especially since they eat cardboard and paper for calcium and carbonate for shell repair. “Whatever color cardboard and paper you give them, that’s what color they’re going to poop.
- Aphids’ sweet poop bubbles, that ants covet so much, causes them to fight off lady bugs, who eat aphids, so the ants can ingest said poop bubbles that are the byproduct of the aphids’ diet of the sugars in plants.
- Bees can’t poop all winter because they can’t fly in the cold. So when they emerge in spring, a lot of yellow bee poop happens. “It looks like mustard,” Maguire said. They also eat aphid poop as part of their honey production.
- Butterflies don’t poop at all because they only drink nectar, blood, urine, the water in puddles and the fluid in other animals’ poop ie: “poop juice.” But that’s OK, because as caterpillars they eat and poop constantly, and usually at the same time.
- Egg-layers like birds, reptiles and amphibians have a single sphincter called the cloaca through which they urinate, defecate and lay eggs.
- Parrot fish defecate bits of rock and coral the fish had ingested in their feeding on algae. The rock and coral are ground into grains of sand as the fish passes the indigestible material.
“If you are on a tropical beach, then the beach is almost entirely made up of parrot fish poop,” she said. Atolls are created, in part, the same way, as parrot fish poop 1,000 pounds of sand a year. - Sloths only poop once a week. They are so slow, it is very dangerous for them to do. Many are killed by predators in the attempt. But, if they survive, because they have just rid themselves of one-third of their body weight, they do a kind of dance.
- Humans, if they are healthy, very in the way of little food particles is found in the passing of the “perfect human poop,” because the body absorbs the rest of ingested food to fuel the body.
“Your body turns your food into your body,” Maguire said. - Elephants’ poop is mostly food, she said as she passed around sample to sniff.
“It smells just like grass,” she said. “That’s because it is grass. Elephants poop out enormous amounts of the grass they eat. … Animals eat each others’ poop, animals eat their on poop, but there are a whole bunch of animals that eat their parents’ poop.” - Rabbits, koalas, elephants, hippos, pandas and termites produce two kinds of poop. One is waste, the other is a partially-digested form that their offspring count on for their diet. Rabbits take it further by eating the partially digested poop for their own nutritional needs.
There are also insects that camouflage themselves as poop, or cover themselves with excrement for protection from predators.