Review of ‘Poo, Spew and other Gross Things Animals do!’

Poo Detectives!

Nic and Romane have clearly gone to a huge amount of effort to gather together the fascinating and insightful information in this book. The artwork by Rachel Tribout is fun and engaging and breaks up the text nicely with bright illustrations. The book is easy to follow, never feeling text-heavy or overwhelming, but rather drawing you in to different chapters and examples. The book is 92 pages and broken into eight chapters, with a glossary and index for easy reference. Chapters include “Animal Grossness”, an introduction to the key theme of the book; “Grossness as Self-defence”, which as the name implies, shares stories and information about the clever and crazy gross things animals do to protect themselves; and my personal favourite, “Poo Detectives”, which looks at how animal poo can help us identify and learn more about animals.  The book is recommended for ages 9 – 12, but unless you are well across your animal poo and spew, I would imagine most children and adults alike will learn something interesting and disgusting from this book.

Knowledge level up

In an effort to share the joy of animal poo, I invited some friends to help me review this book. I asked seven children between the ages of 6 and 13 to tell me their favourite gross and/or funny fact from the book, this is what they came up with:

• Hagfish slither into the rotting body of other fish and eat them from the inside out. They often eat so fast “the rotting flesh come straight out of their butts undigested!”.
• Demodex mites (related to ticks) make their home in our facial pores where they live off face oil and grow very fat. They do not have an anus, which means they cannot poo. However, this means when they die the “body bursts or collapses, releasing a lifetime of poo” into our facial pores.
• Some birds can regurgitate partially digested food to impress another bird they are trying to mate with (the authors wisely suggest you do not try this on someone you like);
• Carpenter ants throw up into each other’s mouths to share food between colony member and to feed larvae;
• The greater short-horned lizard can shoot blood out of their eye in self-defence!

Best of all, when we went on a bushwalk with the kids and we came across an animal poo, the kids asked what animal it was from. It was from an echidna and we explained why it sparkles (insect shell) and what to look for. Of course, we also had to tolerate poo and spew jokes for the two hours of the walk, but it was worth it (I think).

A Note on Animal Poo, or Scats:

For those of you still wondering why we would, or should care about animal poo (also known as scats), in terms of field ecology, scats are a valuable source of information on what animals may be found in a particular area. As with using animal tracks, animal poo and other traces, can tell us a good deal about what animals use an environment, without having to see or capture them.

In Australia, all self-respecting terrestrial/mammal field ecologists own a copy of “Tracks, Scats and other Traces: A Field Guide to Australian Mammals” by Barbara Trigg. First published in 1996, by Oxford University Press, this field guide was essential to ecological, survey and research-based field work. This book helped you to understand what to look for and how to identify the markings, scats and other signs as mammal species. Of course, many other animal groups leave signs and traces for us use to identify them, for example, glossy black cockatoos can be identified by a litter of chewed seed cones beneath the she-oak (Allocasuarina) trees they feed in. This information is vital, especially for threatened or cryptic species that can be difficult to see and otherwise identify.

Further reading