Possibly, from your experience or as an observer of other people's habits, you are surprised or you disagree with the headline above, but that is the average time (not one second up, not one second down) that mammals spend in complying with the physiological process of the defecation , according to a study on the hydrodynamics of this physiological act published in the journal Soft Matter .
As stated by one of the authors of the research, mechanical engineer Patricia Yang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, animals cannot recreate themselves, because the smell of excrement attracts predators . The team of experts has recorded elephants, pandas and wild boars in a zoo, as well as a dog in a park, and, stopwatch in hand, they have concluded that they are all dispatched more or less in the same time . Regardless of whether they weigh four kilos or four tons.
In addition to their own recordings, the team also examined how 23 other species defecated thanks to YouTube, as many zoo visitors make videos – and post them – of the animals in this trance.
Other conclusions of the study are that the stool – almost always cylindrical – measures five times the diameter of your rectum and that intestinal mucus plays a decisive role in bowel movements, an act more comparable to the expulsion of a plug than to the gentle exit of toothpaste when squeezing the tube. The larger the animal, the more mucus presents its colon , to speed up the process: that is why the journey of the excrement lasts the same regardless of the length of the journey.
