How might you preserve scat — an animal’s fecal dropping, poo, or poop — for the world’s first poo museum? …or pooseum?
In this BBC Earth Unplugged episode, Maddie Moate visits with Daniel Roberts, co-founder of the National Poo Museum located within the Isle of Wight‘s Sandown Zoo. Roberts is working to hygienically encapsulate scat specimens in clear resin spheres for preservation and display. Moate gets to help make a few meerkat and wallaby spheres, too.
They’re like huge poo-filled marbles! Here’s a fox poo sphere:
Moate also talks with Zoo Director Charlotte Corney about how much valuable information we can learn from scat. The color, textures, ingredients, regularity, and other details can provide clues to an animal’s health and well-being, as well as the ecosystem that it lives in.
Visit PooMuseum.org to learn more. There are also a few poo jokes.
There are quite a few videos about poop on this site, including sea cucumbers are underwater vacuum cleaners, the GPS-navigated rolling of the dung beetle, and Poop Guy.
Bonus video: You Are Your Microbes.
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