There are many reasons to be jealous of the English language. The word poo is one of them. It’s pronounced “pu”, so cute, so harmless. In German, however: “Kacke”. Or as a verb, depending on usage. Sure, everyone does it, but people don’t like to talk about it, at least in Germany. English-speaking countries have it easier. Maybe it’s because in these countries there is sometimes, beware, a Pooseum. You wouldn’t even want to imagine what that would be called in Germany.
The Pooseum in Richmond, Tasmania, is described as “innovative” in the travel guide prose, but the approach for a museum is rather conventional: there are tons of exhibits, for example of Tasmanian devils, lions and dinosaurs, and you can also read educational information about the origin of the flatbreads, balls, and heaps or dice. Yes, wombats’ feces are cube-shaped. The Australian marsupial mammals, which are up to one meter long, drop 80 to 100 blocks every day.
People usually think of feces as just poop. But in nature’s circular economy, the remains of living things are much more: a nutrient-rich resource for plants and animals. Dung beetles lay their eggs in the feces of ruminants and also feed on them themselves. Rabbits eat their own waste to extract more nutrients from their food in a second round of digestion. Whale poop is essential for plankton production in the world’s oceans. The mammals act like pumps in the maritime nutrient cycle: They gorge themselves in nutrient-rich deep waters and then deposit their waste on the surface, where it serves as fertilizer for the phytoplankton. The spider species Phrynarachne ceylonica camouflages itself as a blob of bird poop and even gives off a scent to evade enemies and attract prey at the same time. And of course, your own feces are sometimes used for self-defense.
Karin Koch from Richmond came up with the idea for the Pooseum. The homepage says she has knowledge of art, tourism and event management and was looking for a new project when she read a story “about a small caterpillar that can throw its poop up to 1.5 meters.” . A 1.8 meter tall person would have to catapult his remains 70 meters to keep up. “Intrigued, I began researching animal feces and soon the idea for a feces museum was born.” There she explains why koalas eat their mother’s feces and how bats manage not to soil themselves while hanging upside down.
The Museum of Faeces in Tasmania is not very large, but after an hour every visitor should have digested enough information. What would be more innovative is to dedicate a museum to such legacies. Or?
In fact, numerous natural history museums have already had a walk-in intestine including an exhibition about the digestive tract, which is very commendable; in Germany alone, an estimated twelve million people live with irritable bowel syndrome. Books about the digestive tract sell millions of copies. The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester went one step further in July 2023: a kind of internal adventure playground was set up there for a year, complete with a slide and fart machine. The Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, is home to the National Poo Museum, which calls itself a “micro-museum” – more of a curiosity for tourists than a scientific discussion.
Every living creature has its own ecosystem within it
Finally, the so-called Poozeum is open around the clock, at least the digital branch on the Internet. George Frandsen presents what, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the world’s largest collection of coprolites, i.e. fossil feces. In videos he presents – sometimes dressed like Indiana Jones – some of the more than 8,000 finds. Among them is the fossilized pile of a T. rex. It goes by the name “Barnum” and is considered the largest coprolite of a carnivore. Frandsen also makes the fossilized feces available to researchers. Paleontologists can thus reconstruct what was on the menu millions of years ago and what the world looked like back then, with its original plants and ancestors of today’s animal species.
But there’s one thing the fossil feces don’t reveal: which bacteria once populated the digestive tracts of dinosaurs and early mammals. Every living being has its own ecosystem within it, a diverse community of microbes that not only helps with digestion, but also provides important services for all living beings: For example, the microbiome protects against allergies and autoimmune diseases and supplies the body with nutrients and repels germs.
Around a thousand billion bacteria live in every gram of stool; they can be classified into up to 500 different species. Each takes on different tasks. But low-fiber ready-made foods and medications are detrimental to biodiversity, as studies have now shown. “We found that we are losing biodiversity in the intestine,” says medical microbiologist Adrian Egli from the University of Zurich. “There is much more diversity in the Amazon compared to the western population.”
In an international undertaking, Egli and his colleagues now want to save what can still be saved. The group wants to store stool samples in a storage facilityin order to preserve the diversity of intestinal bacteria – also with the ulterior motive of being able to treat diseases. Fecal transplants from healthy donors have already proven successful in treating some intestinal diseases.
Bacteria could survive for decades in a solution, as Egli says. 2,500 stool samples are already stored in freezers at minus 80 degrees Celsius. They come from Ethiopia, Laos, Puerto Rico and Switzerland, among others. Tens of thousands more samples from all over the world are expected to land in Zurich soon. To do this, a safe must be built for final storage, says Egli. The ice chests in his laboratory will soon no longer be enough.
Further episodes of the SZ series “What is that?” read below sz.de/kuriose-sammlungen.