By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

This amazing world of ours – whoever created it has put in just about every variation that the cosmic mind can think of.

What are the odd features of animal urination and defecation?

Dogs go round and round before they urinate and defecate to align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field facing either north or south.

Female porcupines are only available for mating for about half a day a year. During this brief time, they hang around the males who predictably fight with each other till the winner gets the girl. He will sniff every inch of her body. And then he will stand on its hind legs and hose her down with a massive stream of urine.  Some males can do this from as far as 7 feet away. Once the female has been thoroughly soaked, they are ready to do the deed. If she is not ready she will scream, shake off the urine and run off. If she is willing then she’ll expose her quill-less underbelly.

Female giraffes emit scents to inform the males they are ready for mating. When a male giraffe takes a liking to a female he nudges her backside to induce urination. He then takes a mouthful of her urine. If it tastes “fertile” to him, then he begins to officially court her, following her around till she gives in.

To find a mate the hippo must first advertise his presence and availability. He does this by defecating and urinating and twirling his tail round and round like an airplane propeller throwing his excrement all over till a female is attracted

Koalas, elephants and bats have special microbes in their digestive systems which break down hard-to-digest food. These animals’ babies are not born with microbes, and eat their parents’ faeces to establish them in their digestive systems. When the koala baby needs to wean itself from its mother’s milk it forces its nose into the mother’s rectum and energetically eats the faeces as the first proper meal.

Rabbits produce up to 500 pellets a day. That is about one every three minutes of the day. Rabbits eat their food twice, once normally and once after they eject it as excreta pellets, to make sure that they get as much as they can out of what they eat.  So do capybaras, the largest rodents in the world. The only difference is that they produce two types of poop. The soft, green excrement still has some nutrition and will be eaten again. The harder, darker kind gets left to rot.

Groups of animals like horses or deer use faeces to mark their territory. It’s their way of saying, “This is our area, stay away!” These community toilets act as message boards. A quick sniff can tell an animal how old they were, what sex they were, and if they were head of the pack or at the bottom of the pile.

Some insects disguise themselves as faeces. Crab spiders do this to catch moths. Swallowtail Butterfly larvae do this to keep themselves from being eaten by predators. The double-banded courser of Africa disguises its eggs as faeces.

Baby Komodo dragons and potato beetle babies cover themselves in their own faeces to avoid being eaten. Unlike baby komodos, the beetle’s faeces are actually poisonous to predators.

The hippopotamus defecates on his regular trail to the river and back. He uses this method for navigation. Cave rats make urine trails throughout the deep, dark caverns of the caves, which tell the rats how to find their way in the dark. The South American degu, a small rodent, uses urine to mark its passageways. Its urine reflects ultraviolet light, which the degu can see.

Secretary birds use dried zebra dung to build their nests. Millipedes make their nests out of their own. Termites mix their excreta with chewed wood to build termite mounds.

The turkey vulture, squirts excreta on its legs to cool off.

Male goats use their urine as perfume. They spray themselves lavishly over their faces, stomachs and forelegs prior to mating. He will smell and taste the female’s urine as well while he is mating her

Mountain goat diets lack only one thing: salt. Like cattle, they will seek out and lick any rock or piece of ground that’s a little salty. Unlike cattle they look for it in salt and minerals from human urine and sweat on clothing. They will often paw and dig areas on the ground where hikers have urinated or disposed of cooking wastewater and chew unattended clothing.

Penguins don’t want their plumage spoiled by their excreta. So they eject explosively often as far as 40 cms away choosing a direction of the wind that will make sure it doesn’t come back to them.

Tortoises need to survive in the desert. Their main defence is their bladder, which is massive. A desert tortoise can hold over forty per cent of its body weight in its bladder. It stores water against times of drought, as well as urea, uric acid, and nitrogenous wastes. If the tortoise is attacked, it proceeds to unleash the power of its urine all over its attacker.

Wolves, even the male leaders of the pack, urinate while squatting. However, when they want to mark their territory then they lift a hind leg to urinate on a higher spot. The alpha female usually urinates on a scent post that her breeding partner has just urinated on. All other females in the pack, and young and low-ranking male wolves, will urinate while squatting

White Rhino bulls mark their territory with faeces and urine. The dung is laid in 20-30 well defined piles to alert passing rhinoceros that it is occupied territory. Other males may deposit dung over the piles of another and subsequently the sign-post grows larger and larger. Such a dung heap can become up to five metres wide and one metre high. After defecating, Greater one horned rhinos scratch their hind feet in the dung. By continuing to walk, they “transport” their own smell around the paths, establishing a scent-marked trail.

When male lobsters fight, they squirt each other in the face with urine.

Baby bears are born in winter and stay inside their dens until spring. Every time a cub finishes being nursed, the mom licks its bottom to make it urinate. The mother bear then drinks the urine, which helps keep the den clean.

Sloths are famous for their bizarre bathroom habits. Both two-fingered and three-fingered sloths will only defecate once a week, and they will only do it on the ground. For a sloth, this is a big deal. A sloth’s entire lifestyle is based around avoiding detection and using as little energy as possible. It takes a sloth on a tree an entire month to digest just one leaf, meaning that they don’t have the ability to be very active. Descending from the safety of the canopy to the forest floor not only needs energy, it is also a suicide mission. Sloths are extremely vulnerable to predation when on the ground. These animals can store up to a third of their body weight in faeces.

The most amazing is the relationship between the tree shrew and the giant carnivorous pitcher plant.  Insect-prey in Borneo is scarce. So the largest meat-eating aerial plant in the world no longer eats small animals but small animal faeces. It has evolved into a toilet for the tree shrew. Botanists have discovered that the plant uses tasty nectar to attract tree shrews, and then ensures its pitcher is big enough to collect the feeding mammal's droppings.. A small tree shrew climbs up to lick the concave lid of the, ‘toilet plant.’ The inside of this lid is covered with glands that exude huge amounts of nectar. Busily engaged in slurping down the nectar that lines the plant’s ‘lid’, the tree shrew does his business in the bowl of the pitcher plant. A sweet, liquid free lunch for the tree shrew and a deposit for the plant which supplies it the nitrogen required.

God tussi Great ho !

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