Boomerang - March 2021

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WHAT GOES IN MUST GO OUT EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ... POOP!

ISSUE #10 • march 2021

WHAT? I DON’T ALWAYS GO IN THE WOODS.

THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM The digestive system consists of the parts of the body that work together to turn food and liquids into the building blocks and fuel that the body needs.

MOUTH

PHARYNX ESOPHAGUS

IN THIS ISSUE 04 DIGESTING YOUR FOOD FROM A TO Z

What you eat takes a trip through your body, only to get flushed.

06 POOPING PROBLEMS

When you can’t go, it’s called constipation.

08 WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM POOP Scientists think poop is a gold mine of useful data.

LIVER GALLBLADDER STOMACH PANCREAS LARGE INTESTINE [CECUM, COLON, AND RECTUM]

12 THE ULTIMATE SURVIVAL STORY

How one beetle survives being eaten by a frog … and takes a “rear exit.”

PLUS:

10 ACTIVITY! NAME THAT POOP! IDENTIFYING ANIMALS BY THEIR WASTE 14 ACTIVITY! POOP INVESTIGATORS WORD SEARCH 14 BOOKSHELF 15 MAZE

SMALL INTESTINE {DUODENUM, JEJUNUM, AND ILEUM]

APPENDIX

RECTUM 02

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REVIEWED BY: KIDSHEALTH MEDICAL EXPERTS

The small intestine breaks down the food mixture even more so your body

DIGESTING YOUR FOOD

can absorb all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates and fats. The grilled chicken on your pizza is full of

FROM A-Z

THE MOUTH STARTS EVERYTHING MOVING Sitting at lunch, enjoying some grilled-chicken pizza, orange wedges and milk, you’re not thinking about where it’s going or what’s happening inside you. But in the next few hours, it will go through a complex process that ends in poop!

Even before you eat, when you smell, see or think about a tasty food, digestion begins.

proteins and a little fat, and the small intestine can help extract them with

ON THE WAY DOWN The esophagus is like a stretchy pipe that’s about 10 inches long. It moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. Also at the back of your throat is your windpipe, which allows air to come in and out of your body. When you swallow a small ball of mushed-up food or a liquid, a special flap called the epiglottis (say: ep-ih-GLOT-iss) flops down over the opening of your windpipe to make sure the food only enters the esophagus. It’s like your

a little help from three friends: the

SEE YOU IN THE STOMACH Your stomach, which is attached to the end of the esophagus, is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. It has three important jobs:

1. TO STORE THE FOOD YOU’VE EATEN 2. TO BREAK DOWN THE FOOD INTO A LIQUID-LIKE MIXTURE 3. TO SLOWLY EMPTY THAT LIQUID-LIKE MIXTURE INTO THE SMALL INTESTINE

throat’s gate!

The stomach acts like a mixer, Have you ever coughed after

churning and mashing together all

swallowing something too quickly?

the small balls of food that came

Saliva (aka spit) begins to form

Your epiglottis didn’t have enough

down the esophagus into smaller

in your mouth.

time to close completely, and the

and smaller pieces. It does this with

substance went down your windpipe.

help from the strong muscles in the

When you do eat, the saliva breaks

You cough without thinking about it

walls of the stomach and gastric

down the chemicals in the food

to clear it out.

(say: GAS-trik) juices that also come from the stomach’s walls. In addition

a bit, which helps make the food mushy and easy to swallow. Your

Once food has entered the

to breaking down food, gastric juices

tongue helps out, pushing the

esophagus, it doesn’t just drop right

help kill bacteria that might be in the

food around while you chew with

into your stomach. Instead, muscles

eaten food.

your teeth. When you’re ready to

in the walls of the esophagus move

swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny

in a wavy way to slowly squeeze the

bit of mushed-up food, called

food through the esophagus.

a bolus, toward your throat and into

This takes about 2 or 3 seconds.

the opening of your esophagus, the second part of the digestive tract.

Onward to the small intestine!

22 FEET ISN’T THAT SMALL The small intestine is a long tube that’s about 1.5 inches to 2 inches around, and it’s packed inside you beneath your stomach. If you stretched out an adult’s small intestine, it would be about 22 feet

LOVE YOUR LIVER

Before it goes, it passes through the

The nutrient-rich blood comes

colon, which is where the body gets

directly to the liver for processing.

The liver filters out harmful substances or wastes, turning some of the waste into more bile. The liver even helps figure out how many

pancreas, liver and gallbladder.

nutrients will go to the rest of the

Those organs send different juices to

in storage. For example, the liver

the first part of the small intestine.

These juices help to digest food and allow the body to absorb nutrients.

The pancreas makes juices that help the body digest fats and protein.

A juice from the liver called bile helps to absorb fats into the bloodstream.

And the gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it.

body, and how many will stay behind stores certain vitamins and a type of sugar your body uses for energy.

THAT’S ONE LARGE INTESTINE At 3 or 4 inches around, the large intestine is fatter than the small intestine and it’s almost the last stop on the digestive tract. Like the small intestine, it is packed into the body and would measure 5 feet long if

Your food may spend as long as four hours in the small intestine and will turn into a very thin, watery mixture.

It’s time well-spent because at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza, orange and milk can pass from the intestine into the blood.

Once in the blood, your body is closer to benefiting from the complex carbohydrates in the pizza crust, the vitamin C in your orange, the protein in the chicken and the calcium in your milk.

spread out.

liver! And the leftover waste — parts of the food that your body can’t use — goes on to the large intestine.

its last chance to absorb the water and some minerals into the blood.

As the water leaves the waste product, what’s left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solid. Yep, it’s poop (also called stool or a bowel movement).

The large intestine pushes the poop into the rectum (say: REK-tum), the very last stop on the digestive tract. The solid waste stays in the rectum until you are ready to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom, you’re getting rid of this solid waste by pushing it through the anus. There’s the flush we were talking about! (Don’t forget to wash your hands!)

The large intestine has a tiny tube

DIG THAT DIGESTIVE SYSTEM

with a closed end coming off it

You can help your digestive system

called the appendix. It’s part of the digestive tract, but it doesn’t seem to do anything, though it can cause big problems. It sometimes gets infected and needs to be removed through surgery.

Like we mentioned, after most of the nutrients are removed from the food mixture, there is stuff left over. This

Next stop for these nutrients: the

part of the large intestine called the

stuff needs to be passed out of the body. Can you guess where it ends up? Well, here’s a hint: It goes out with a flush.

by drinking water and eating a healthy diet that includes foods rich in fiber. High-fiber foods, like fruits, vegetables and whole grains, make it easier for poop to pass through your system.

The digestive system is a pretty important part of your body. Without it, you couldn’t get the nutrients you need to grow properly and stay healthy. Now, next time you sit down to lunch, you’ll know where your food goes … from start to finish!

small intestine

long. That’s like 22 notebooks lined up end to end in a row! All folded up inside your gut!

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POOPING PROBLEMS

AD I SHOULD HAVE HAVE H K. MORE FIBER THIS WEE

YOU MIGHT THINK YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS THIS PROBLEM, BUT SOMETIMES YOU JUST CAN’T “GO,” RIGHT? AND YOU FEEL MISERABLE. THAT’S KNOWN AS CONSTIPATION. REVIEWED BY: JOANNE MURREN-BOEZEM, MD Someone might have constipation if they have: • Fewer than three bowel movements (BMs) in a week • Trouble having a bowel movement • Stool (poop) that’s hard, dry and unusually large Constipation is a very common problem. It usually isn’t a cause for concern. Healthy eating and exercise habits can help prevent it.

WHAT CAUSES CONSTIPATION? Reasons why people get constipated include:

Unhealthy diet. Constipation can be due to a diet that doesn’t include enough water and fiber, both of which help the bowels move as they should. People who eat lots of processed foods, cheeses, white bread and bagels, and meats may find they’re constipated often. A healthier diet that includes high-fiber foods (like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains) can keep the stool from getting hard and dry.

Not enough exercise. Moving around helps food move through the digestive system. So not getting enough physical activity can contribute to constipation.

Stress. People can get constipated when they’re anxious about something, like a life change or a problem at home. Stress can affect how the digestive system works and can cause constipation, as well as other conditions, like diarrhea.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). A person with IBS may have either constipation or diarrhea, as well as stomach pain and gas.

Ignoring the natural urge. Avoiding going to the bathroom, even when you really have the urge to go, can cause constipation. When you ignore the urge to go, it can be harder to go later on.

Some medicines. Sometimes, medicines like antidepressants and those used to treat iron deficiencies can lead to constipation.

In rare cases, constipation is a sign of other medical illnesses. Talk to your parents if you continue to have problems or if the constipation lasts for two to three weeks.

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BOOMERANG EXCLUSIVE:

WHAT CAUSES CONSTIPATION CLICK TO PLAY

SIGNS & SYMPTOMS OF CONSTIPATION Different people have different bathroom habits. Someone who doesn’t have a bowel movement every day isn’t necessarily constipated. One person might go three times a day, while another might go once every two to three days.

But if you’re going less than you normally do, or if it’s often hard or painful to go, you might be constipated. A person with constipation might: • feel full or bloated • feel pain when pooping • have to strain to have a bowel movement • notice a little blood on the toilet paper

WHAT TO DO? To prevent and treat constipation: • Drink more liquids. Drinking enough water and other liquids helps keep stools soft so they can move more easily through the intestines. When you don’t drink enough, the stool can get hard and dry, and you might get stopped up.

•

Eat more fiber. Eating high-fiber foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain bread, can help prevent constipation. Fiber can’t be digested, so it helps clean out the intestines by moving the bowels along. A diet full of fatty, sugary or starchy foods can slow the bowels down. To get more fiber in your diet, try fresh fruits like pears, apples (with the skin), oranges and ripe bananas, or dried fruits like prunes. Other high-fiber foods include beans, oatmeal, whole-grain breads and popcorn.

•

Make sure you get enough exercise. Physical activity helps move food through the digestive system and nudges the bowels into action, so be sure to get plenty of exercise. It can be as simple as playing catch, cycling or shooting a few hoops.

•

Set a regular meal schedule.

Eating is a natural stimulant for the bowels, so regular meals may help you develop routine bowel habits. You might schedule breakfast a little earlier to give yourself a chance for a relaxed visit to the bathroom before school.

•

Get into the habit of going.

Maybe you don’t want to use the bathroom at school, or maybe you just don’t want to stop what you’re doing when the urge hits.

But ignoring your body’s signals that it’s time to poop can make it harder to go later on.

Some medical conditions like diabetes, lupus or problems with the thyroid gland also can cause constipation. If you’re worried that your constipation is a sign of something else, talk to your parents and your doctor.

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Study something in a test tube, and scientists say that the research was performed in vitro.

That’s Latin meaning “in glass.”

Study it in a living body, and it’s in vivo (“in a living thing”). But what if your research has you poking around in poop? Scientists haven’t had a word for that until recently.

Introducing in fimo. This new scientific term describes experiments done on feces.

The term, based on the Latin word fimus, meaning “dung.”

For most of us, poop is gross stuff.

We deal with it only grudgingly.

But for some scientists, it can be a gold mine of useful data. Feces can provide clues to someone’s health, an animal’s diet or the environment in which an organism lives. That’s what drove these three scientists to in fimo research. They use it to learn about the bacteria in our gut, dinosaur diets and just how poop gets its variety of shapes.

WOMBAT POOP IS SQUARE

FOR MOST OF US, POOP IS GROSS STUFF. WE DEAL WITH IT ONLY GRUDGINGLY. BUT FOR SOME SCIENTISTS, IT CAN BE A GOLD MINE OF USEFUL DATA. BY: ILIMA LOOMIS SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS

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Patricia Yang studies fluid mechanics — the science of moving fluids — in animals at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Coming from a family of scientists, “I knew what it was like to have a lab coat and work in a clean lab,” she says. But she was looking for a different way to do science. The answer came on a trip to the zoo.

She accompanied her advisor, who was studying how animals urinate. “I thought, ‘This is a fluid-mechanics problem that I can solve!’ At the same time,” she notes, “I saw animals pooping and thought there were probably some similarities there, as well.”

Yang has since studied many info-packed bodily substances, including urine, blood and, of course, feces. And after spending a lot of time with poop, she thought she knew it well. It comes in two main shapes. People, dogs and cats are in the group that poop “cylinders.”

Deer and bunnies are among those whose droppings resemble pellets.

But, it turns out, there’s a third shape: square.

“I gave a talk at a conference, and a professor told me, ‘You missed one.

There’s a square poop. Wombat poop is square!’” she recalls. That one was new to her.

Wombats are squat marsupials from Australia. They look like a cross between a groundhog and a koala bear. Yang was curious. And suspicious. Square poop? It didn’t make sense. “It’s not right for body design,” she says. “I didn’t think a human or animal could really make a square.” In fact, she observes, square shapes are extremely rare in nature.

Other than the bones of some sea horses, Yang couldn’t think of many examples of naturally occurring squares. She says, “We decided we had to see it before we could claim that it’s true.”

Yang found pictures of wombat droppings online. Still, she wasn’t convinced. Someone could have shaped the droppings into cubes after the fact. She contacted zoos with wombats and asked for samples of poop. They refused.

Finally, Yang got in touch with Scott Carver. He’s a wildlife ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. And because he was interested in the same topic, he was happy to help.

He confirmed firsthand that out of four wombat species, Vombatus ursinus, also known as the common or bare-nosed wombat, indeed makes square feces. Then, to help Yang figure how they do it, he sent her the intestines of two such wombats that had died after being hit by cars.

Opening up the intestines, Yang was excited by what she found.

“There are squares inside,” she notes, “even before the feces comes out!”

The wombat’s anus doesn’t produce the square shape, she realized. “It’s happening in their gut!”

ON TO BALLOONING RESEARCH Yang also noticed that, while the wombats’ intestines averaged 19 feet long each, only the last 5 feet contained the unusually shaped feces. Before that, the wastes were soft and unformed. “In the final length, they are all square with the same dimensions,” she says. Well, at 0.8 by 0.8 by 1.6 inches, they’re actually rectangles.

Yang and her colleagues thought about how this squared shape might form. An animal’s intestine squeezes waste into solid pieces and then pushes it through the body by contracting. What if the wombat intestine does not contract uniformly?

The researchers took a long balloon, like those used to make balloon animals, made tick marks along the now-empty intestine and then inflated the balloon inside it. The marks allowed the researchers to see how different parts of the intestine moved as it expanded. The marks don’t expand evenly, Yang noted.

That revealed the tissue of the intestine was not uniform. Some areas were soft; others were stiff.

When the intestine contracted, it didn’t do so evenly. It pushed down harder in some areas than others.

This created edges and angles.

The result: rectangles with slightly rounded edges.

“This is an extreme case of how the property of intestines changes the shape of feces,” Yang concludes.

Her discovery is more than just an interesting factoid. Yang says it could help shape items in a poopfree venue: manufacturing.

“Right now, we only have two ways of making cubes: We either mold them with solid molds or we cut them,” she says. This wombat data points to “a third way of making cubes.”

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N A M E T H AT

Rabbit Poop Rabbit poo is very small — only pea-sized — and is usually black, light-brown or green in color. It is filled with plant and grass pieces.

Look out for rabbit droppings scattered at communal toilets (like at campgrounds), which are often near burrow entrances.

Mice Poop Mouse droppings are similar in size and shape to a grain of rice. Fresh droppings are very dark brown and lighten as they age.

Squirrel Poop Squirrel droppings are cylindrical in shape with rounded edges. Because of their diet, they are brown or red in color and vary in length from eight millimeters to three-eighths of an inch in length.

Opossum Poop Opossum droppings are fairly large and may be confused with dog feces. Opossums tend to use the same area as a toilet over and over again, so you may find quite a lot of droppings and urine in one spot.

Skunk Poop While skunk droppings look similar to raccoons’ and cats’, the contents may be the best way to differentiate. Skunk droppings often contain undigested insects, berries, fur or feathers.

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DIGGING INTO DINO DROPPINGS Ancient poop gives us a different type of information. Most manure breaks down and becomes compost, which is a good thing, since a poop-covered planet would be disgusting. But under special conditions, feces may get preserved as fossils for millions of years. Such fossils get a special name: coprolites. And to Karen Chin, they’re a great tool for studying how dinosaurs ate and interacted with their environment.

Chin works at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a paleoecologist, she studies the ancient environment. Chin first became interested in feces while working as a seasonal interpreter at national parks such as Yellowstone and Glacier. When she led people on hikes, the groups rarely saw animals. They instead encountered scat, another name for expelled animal waste. That scat offers a window into “what’s happening in the natural world when you’re not there,” she says.

Later, as a paleontologist, one of her early jobs was writing descriptions for a museum’s dinosaur collection. When she was asked to write about its dinosaur coprolites, she got hooked. Chin wanted to know how soft material like feces might become fossilized. She was also curious about what that poop could tell her about dinosaurs’ diet and the environment in which they lived.

Unlike deer pellets or bear scat, “dinosaur coprolites are very rare,” she notes. To be preserved, feces had to land in a place where it would be quickly buried. One sample she’s studied, for instance, came from a tidal flat. “The dinosaur walked across and pooped, then the tide rose and helped bury the feces,” she explains.

Smaller coprolites are a bit easier to find. “They’re sausage-shaped and look like dog feces,” she says. But bigger dinosaur poops can be hard to identify. “If you go to the zoo — which I have — and watch elephants defecate, [the poop balls] drop from a considerable height,” she says.

“They can be deformed when they fall or trampled.”

Chin studies these larger coprolites from dinosaurs. To make sure they’re not just “ugly misshapen rocks,” she checks from what chemicals they’re made. She also looks for pieces of chopped-up organic matter, such as leaves, shell or bone. If she sees signs of tiny tunnels or burrowing by dung beetles or other invertebrates, that’s even more evidence that she’s got genuine dinosaur poop on her hands.

If she has permission from the coprolite’s owner (usually a museum), she can cut a thin section from the sample and place it under a microscope.

She’ll look for bits of what the dinosaur ate, such as cells from animal muscle or bone, plant tissues or pieces of fungi.

In one recent study, Chin examined coprolites that probably came from one or more types of hadrosaurs. These duck-billed dinos lived some 75 million years ago in what is now southern Utah. Their coprolites contained evidence that the dinosaurs had been eating rotting wood.

Even more surprising, mixed in with the wood was crunched up pieces of crustacean. That was odd since these dinosaurs were thought to be strictly plant-eaters.

The crustaceans were big enough that the dinosaurs could have spit them out if they didn’t want to eat them. What’s more, the crustaceans were found in seven out of every 10 coprolites she studied. This led Chin

to think this carnivorous snack was no accident. But this isn’t necessarily weird behavior for plant-eaters. Some modern plant-eating birds eat insects or other animals to increase their protein intake when they’re ready to lay eggs. Maybe these dinos — the ancestors of birds — were doing the same thing.

“Whether or not the dinosaurs actually hunted the crustaceans, we don’t know. But if they were feeding on rotting wood and happened to ingest crustaceans, I think they ate them readily,” she says. “That changes our traditional view of these lumbering dinosaurs.” They weren’t just standing there feeding on leaves.

DEVELOPING STOOL STANDARDS Poop can give a different view of much smaller critters, too. Over the past 10 years, scientists have learned that the community of microbes living in the gut is hugely important to human health. This collection of microbes is known as our microbiome.

Scientists can learn about the gut microbiome by studying what comes out of the gut: namely, poop. Now researchers and drug companies are racing to learn more about how this microbiome works, how it can be used to diagnose diseases and how it might lead to new treatments.

But there’s a catch. There is no standard, agreed-upon way to analyze the genetics of the human microbiome. So, every lab uses slightly different tools and methods to extract and analyze the DNA from a bacterial sample. No surprise, then, that different studies get different results.

Scott Jackson wants to change that.

As a microbial genomicist, he studies the genes of microbes. He works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. He leads its Complex Microbial Systems group. Jackson is using poop to develop standard ways to analyze microbes in the human gut.

Figuring out the DNA of a member of a microbiome is far harder than sequencing the DNA of a single animal or plant. (Sequencing involves figuring out the order of nucleotides

— chemicals that make up the rungs in the ladder-like structure — in an organism’s DNA.) A scientist looking at the DNA of a single organism often already knows who or what it is. When delving into a bit of poop or other microbiome sample, scientists will be starting with something that contains hundreds of different species of microbes. What’s more, half of those microbes might still be scientifically unknown. Researchers have to sort out the DNA to see which species are in the sample and roughly how many of each are present.

Since each lab can come up with slightly different results as they do these analyses, Jackson’s group came up with a plan to compare results from a big group of labs.

That might prove helpful for future research in this field.

His group has sent out about 100 kits since they launched the project in 2018. “We have 700 kits, and we’re not going to stop until that 700th kit is shipped,” he says. “What we want to see is how much variability you get when you measure one sample using 100 different methods.”

Jackson has some theories about what the study will reveal. For one, he expects that not all 700 labs will get the same results. Besides getting more data on how widely the labs’ findings differ, Jackson hopes the project will help identify the tools and methods that work the best. And that’s info that can help guide the next generation of poop scientists.

To most of us, poop is just a mushedup bunch of smelly waste. But a select group of scientists is finding new meaning in “waste not, want not.”

The researchers started by collecting stool from five generous people. Each donor’s feces were blended to homogenize (make them uniformly mixed) the samples.

Researchers from another group, the BioCollective, prepared the samples using a household Ninja blender. The resulting product had “the consistency of a smoothie,” Jackson says.

That poop smoothie was then divided into 700 tubes. Each held about 1 milliliter (one-fifth of a teaspoon) of poop. The tubes were then divvied into 700 kits, with each kit containing one tube from each of the five people. “That’s 3,500 tubes of poop,” Jackson notes.

Jackson’s team recruited labs around the world to participate in the tests. Each was asked to sequence the DNA from the microbes in a kit, then upload their results to a website. That would let Jackson’s group compare the findings from lab to lab.

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BY: JONATHAN LAMBERT SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS

Shinji Sugiura regularly feeds beetles to predators to see what happens. He is an ecologist at Kobe University in Japan. In 2018, he discovered that bombardier beetles can force toads to vomit them up. The beetles start the process by releasing a mix of hot, noxious chemicals from their rear ends.

Sugiura had a hunch that R. attenuata might have evolved its own evasive tactics. In his lab, he paired one of these beetles with a frog that the insect often sees while swimming through Japanese rice paddies.

Then he watched.

FOR MOST INSECTS, THE STICKY, SLINGSHOT RIDE STRAIGHT INTO A FROG’S MOUTH SPELLS THE END. BUT NOT FOR ONE STUBBORN WATER BEETLE. It doesn’t succumb to the frog’s digestive juices. Instead, the Regimbartia attenuata beetle will travel down the frog’s throat, swim through the stomach and slide along the intestines. Afterward, it climbs out the frog’s butt, alive and well.

“This is legitimately the first article in a while that made me say, ‘Huh! How weird!’” says Crystal Maier. She’s an entomologist, or insect biologist, at Harvard University. She works at its Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass. “There are still a lot of truly bizarre habits of insects that wait to be discovered,” she says.

It’s not unheard of, but surviving digestion-by-predator is rare. Some snails survive the trip through fish and birds. They just seal their shells and wait it out. But this new research, published in Current Biology, is the first to document prey actively escaping out the backside of a predator.

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The frog quickly downed the unsuspecting beetle.

The frog lacks teeth, so the beetle didn’t get crunched up. A trip through the frog’s acidic, oxygenpoor digestive system, though, should be enough to kill the insect. But as Sugiura watched, he saw the shiny black beetle slip out from the frog’s butt. Then the insect scurried away, seemingly unharmed.

A WATER BEETLE SWALLOWED ALIVE

BY A FROG ESCAPES THROUGH THE BUTT SCIENCE NEWS About two hours before this video begins, this pond frog (Pelophylax nigromaculatus) ate a water beetle (Regimbartia attenuata). After traveling the frog’s digestive tract, the beetle emerges from the back end of the amphibian, alive. It’s the first documented example of prey actively escaping a predator through its digestive system.

“I was very surprised,” he says. “I was expecting that the frog might just spit out the beetle or something.”

Sugiura watched more than 30 more beetle-frog matchups. He found that more than nine in every 10 beetles survived being eaten. They greatly outshone other animals known to survive digestion-bypredator. Those creatures typically survive fewer than two times in 10. Most beetles complete the trip within six hours. One intrepid beetle, though, made the journey in just six minutes!

To confirm that the beetles were actively escaping from the frog’s digestive tract, Sugiura fixed some beetles’ legs in place with sticky wax. None of these immobilized beetles survived. Their carcasses took a day or longer to pass through the frogs.

This beetle’s aquatic lifestyle likely prepared it to survive digestion, Sugiura now says. It has a streamlined, but sturdy, exoskeleton. This may shield the insect from digestive juices. The beetle can also breathe under water via air pockets tucked under its hardened wings. This likely prevents suffocation.

Sugiura plans to test the limits of the beetle’s abilities by pairing the insect with larger frogs, toads and even fish. “I’m looking forward to finding unimaginable types of antipredator defense,” he says.

CLICK TO PLAY

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BOOMERANG BOOKSHELF

WORD SEARCH

DIGESTIVE SYSTEM FIND THE WORDS & ANIMALS ASSOCIATED WITH THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM BILE

ESOPHAGUS

LIVER

SALIVA

DIGESTION

FOOD

POOP

STOMACH

ENZYMES

INTESTINE

RECTUM

TEETH

S H R R E F U V 0 Q D E I E N 14

U N E E U A E H C A M 0 T S S

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G S V C M C T C E F S D J D G

A I Y T U L I V E R I A I 0 Z

H E Z U H E I 0 Q V B C Y 0 M

P Y N M G T L 0 N V E Z P F Z

O I M I S N E I K K B U I Y C

S D F E T N N T B N E V P N T

E N G V Z S P 0 0 P H N A K R

S I W Y V Q E D I I L 0 B H K

D A M S H K L T V F T V Z H C

0 E L V Z F G A N Y Z U T 0 F

S D K I H C T K U I 0 E D C A

V R B K V K J N G B E B Z E D

F M A X 0 A H D G T S T 0 N K

RELAXED READING = PLEASANT POOPING JURASSIC POOP: WHAT DINOSAURS (AND OTHERS) LEFT BEHIND

BY JACOB BERKOWITZ POOP HAPPENED!: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD FROM THE BOTTOM UP

BY SARAH ALBEE THE BUTT BOOK

BY ARTIE BENNETT THE TRUTH ABOUT POOP

BY SUSAN E. GOODMAN POOP: A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE UNMENTIONABLE

BY NICOLA DAVIES THE KIDS BOOK OF POOP: A FUNNY READ-ALOUD PICTURE BOOK FOR KIDS OF ALL AGES ABOUT POOP AND POOPING

BY PROFESSOR POOPY MCDOODOO Boomerang

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MAKING HEALTH POSSIBLE

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