Poop is on the menu for a surprising number of animals

By Susan Milius
JANUARY 8, 2025 AT 9:00 AM
Feces don’t get enough credit as food.

The stinky stuff is not just an end product after food gets eaten, digested and finally discarded by animal guts. Poop can also be something nutritious, useful and actually eaten (again) in its own right, three researchers point out in the December issue of Animal Behaviour. Tallying just the examples from vertebrates reported in scientific journals, the authors document coprophagy in more than 150 species, from adult black bears to baby koalas.

“I had no idea how many baby animals ate their mom’s poop to get microbes to help populate the gut,” says evolutionary biologist Elaine J. Power, now retired in Eugene, Ore. The list of youngsters includes species as varied as koalas, desert tortoises and ostriches. And that’s just one reason why a species might recycle previously eaten meals. She and another evolutionary biologist, Sally Bornbusch, explored vertebrate fecal scientific literature at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute based in Washington, D.C., during internships with zoo clinical nutritionist Erin Kendrick.

As food, says Power, “poop is a wonderful source if you don’t care about being infected by diseases and parasites.” Some species can’t live without it. Pikas may make it through harsh winters by relying on yak poop. But among the most extreme are cavefish that can’t fly out to forage, so depend heavily on guano from bats that can.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/animal-food-coprophagy-nutrients-poop

Dan Rodricks Retires After 46 Years and 6,600 Columns at The Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Sun
Justin Fenton
Ed Piotrowski
Published Jan 10, 2025 at 01:41 PM

Dan Rodricks, a prominent columnist for The Baltimore Sun, is retiring after 46 years with the publication. In his farewell column, he reflects on his extensive career, which includes over 6,600 columns, and expresses his deep connection to Baltimore, stating that the city will always feel like home. The publisher of The Baltimore Sun remarked that the paper will miss Rodricks, highlighting his significant contributions to journalism in the area. Comparisons have been drawn to Lou Azrael, a former columnist for the News American and Post, who had a longer tenure as a columnist from 1927 to 1981.
https://deepnewz.com/culture/dan-rodricks-retires-after-46-years-6600-columns-the-baltimore-sun-reflecting-on-6e6edb92

Neandertal genes in people today came from hook-ups around 47,000 years ago

By McKenzie Prillaman
DECEMBER 12, 2024 AT 2:00 PM

The time frame in which Neandertals and Homo sapiens heavily intermingled just got a little clearer.

DNA analyses of ancient and modern H. sapiens reveal that Neandertals spread their genes to humans during a single epoch around 47,000 years ago, researchers report in two new studies. The findings narrow the time frame in which this interbreeding could have occurred; previous estimates dated the era to somewhere between 65,000 and 41,000 years ago.

It means that all living people without recent African ancestry descended from the same population of humans that mated with Neandertals in this newly identified period, says evolutionary geneticist Kay Prüfer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who coauthored one of the papers.

Check out this article on science news: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neandertal-mate-people-47000-years-ago?mobile_share=true|

Beautiful fall morning over my driveway

Frederick County, Maryland

Voted early in Maryland

First day with long lines but it was a long blue line!

Hitler potty among Thomas Crapper loos up for sale

Shannen Headley
BBC News, West Midlands

A collection of old Thomas Crapper loos is up for sale, and among the items from the famous bathroom brand is a potty with Adolf Hitler's face on the bottom.
Toilets, taps, basins and baths make up the Crapper cluster, with the owner hoping someone will be "en suite" enough to buy it as a job lot, lest the lovely lavs be split up.
Simon Kirby, former boss at Warwickshire-based Thomas Crapper & Co, is selling hundreds of the antique items eight years after leaving the firm.

The collection, which formed the basis of a private museum at the company, took almost 40 years to assemble and can be yours for about £300,000, if you're feeling flush.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgweykp4e2o

Looking up!

Today, June 30, is Asteroid Day, the anniversary of the 1908 explosion of a rock from space above a Russian town — the sort of danger that, astronomers warn, is always lurking as the Earth hurtles through space.

Learn more: https://asteroidday.org/about/.

Timelapse videos capture Baltimore bridge wreckage removal

From BBC.
Timelapse footage taken over a month by the US Army Corps of Engineers depicts how bridge debris was cleared.

On Monday, the cargo ship Dali was moved from the site of the crash, nearly two months after it hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge on 26 March.
https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69041447

Any CoCoRaHS observers on this forum?

Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network
CoCoRaHS is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers who observe weather. Fun and informative. I started observing in August with daily rain guage reports. Must use the approved guage. Great for retirement. Take a look at https://cocorahs.org/ for more information.

Eclipsed in VT