Faeces Happens Trivia Quiz

Answer: 75%

Water is the main ingredient of human faeces. The very serious - yet debated - Bristol Stool Chart divides faeces into seven categories and only two are considered healthy. While other factors come into play, the content of water (too much or not enough) is one of the main evidences of colon dysfunction.

Answer: elephant

Elephant dung can be used to make paper, and once dried, can be used as a source of fuel in fires.

Whale excrement tends to float on top of water as it has a high content of fat, and is often orange, due to the colour of the krill they eat. . Bear dung varies in size and colour depending on the season. Hibernating animals do not poop while asleep, and this can go on for several months. Vultures poop down their legs to cool themselves off.

Answer: crocodile dung

According to medical texts written in 1850 BC, crocodile poop was used to reduce a woman's fertility. My sources do not indicate how the remedy was administrated ... and maybe it is better that way?

Answer: a stool transplant

In a stool transplant, the stool from a healthy person is placed in the colon of an infected person. Then, according to a study by the American College of Gastroenterology, the billions of friendly and useful bacteria from the healthy person can spread in the digestive tract and treat infections that haven't responded well to antibiotics or probiotics.

While the idea can appear plain disgusting to some, it is actually safer, cheaper and with no side effects than many chemical drugs.

Answer: the berries are eaten - and then defecated - by a civet before being roasted

Kopi Luwak is also called "civet coffee" ("kopi" meaning coffee and "luwak" meaning civet in Indonesian). The story says that Dutch planters, in Java and Sumatra, forbade local people from picking coffee berries for their own use. Soon, local people realised that a small animal, a civet, was eating coffee berries but not the actual beans, which could be found, intact, in their droppings. Local people would collect them (and thus, not pick them from the trees), clean them and use them to make their own coffee. Soon, the Dutch plantation owners heard of civet coffee and it became a favourite of the Western world.

A very small quantity is produced every year, which is why it is so expensive.

Answer: because cat poop has a high content in protein

Carnivores, especially cats, produce excrement that is very high in protein. Other carnivores then eat it to add easily obtained and accessible proteins in their own diet. Carnivores also produce smellier poops, because meat proteins contain a lot of sulfides, which are anions of sulfur, a gas well-known for its foul smell.

Answer: it is made almost entirely of cellulose, which humans cannot digest

Only a few animals can actually digest cellulose, ruminants (such as cows and sheep) and termites being the most common ones. When humans eat corn kernels, the inside of the corn pops out from its cellulose shell, which then goes through the body virtually untouched.

It may look like the kernel is intact, but in fact, it is now hollow, the inner part of the kernel having been, this time, truly digested.

Answer: dung beetles process cattle dung and remove it from the land

Dung beetles are pivotal to a healthy environment. As their name indicates, they use dung as their only or main source of food. Without them, dung from all sorts of animals would remain untouched, contaminating water supplies and preventing plant growth. In areas where humans are raising cattle, their presence is even more crucial. In Australia, local dung beetles were not able to keep up with imported cattle and farmers had to bring it dung beetles from Africa to make sure pastureland would remain clean, and free of flies.

Cows do not eat their own pats, neither do other ruminants. However, many herbivores will eat their own droppings because they cannot digest everything the first time, and they need several takes to digest every fiber. In some arid areas of the world where no trees grow, for instance in the plateau of Himalayas, or in the Sahara, dried dung is often used as a combustible.

Answer: the scientific term for fossilised dung

Coprolites are trace fossils, meaning that they give evidence about animal behaviour as opposed to morphology. When examining coprolites, scientists can determine not only the diet of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures, but also see traces of organisms which existed then and may have disappeared, such as grass, ferns, plants, small animals, etc...

Answer: giraffe dung spitting

The aim of the game is pretty simple. A line is traced on the ground. Each contestant stands behind the line, and one after the other, spits dry giraffe dung as far as possible. The winner is the one who spits his/her dung the furthest. Giraffe dung looks a little like a small, hard and blackened marshmallow.