Why it takes you and an elephant the same amount of time to poop (2017)

michaelbuckbee

Read to the end of the article to learn about NASA's Space Poop challenge and the award winning astronaut diaper the author created.

Gualdrapo

Elephants should do it quicker as they don't do doomscroll when pooping, though

alex1138

Thanks Hacker News

layman51

This reminds me of a news story from many years ago about a research study that won the Ig Nobel Prize. The research study was about how almost all mammals weighing over 3 kg take just about the same amount of time to empty their bladders when urinating.

Smalltalker-80

Mostly solid scientific work, this ;)

anigbrowl

Why would you expect anything else? It's also easier for larger people to pick up heavier weights, larger bullets to make larger holes, etc. etc. Of course larger animals are going to have larger muscles in their digestive tracts in approximate proportion to everything else about them being larger.

larodi

doodie.com was cool back in the day

rwc

I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting but I clicked anyway…

TheAceOfHearts

Since we're on the subject of waste removal, most mammals also pee for roughly the same amount of time [0], around 20 seconds. If you look up a video of an elephant urinating, it's quite the spectacle and the flow is voluminous. [0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/mammals-p...

conductr

I spent a lot of time in hospitals and got a lot of exposure to everything they do in my early adulthood, a few smells are permanently burnt into my brain including the smell of the GI wing. Fast forward a couple decades, and my dilemma right now is a coworker that I share a restroom with. It’s a low traffic restroom so I have seen and know it’s coming from him, but he has some serious GI issues. Likely he’s digesting blood from my memory of the ailments. And so the dilemma is, do I say something to him? He looks like he is in awful health and high probability with an awful diet (based on profiling him). But I don’t interact with him or have any type of relationship and saying something would be incredibly awkward. Surely he knows I tell myself.

Simulacra

But I'm on the clock so..of course I take longer.

vezuchyy

Are you trying to say that an elephant with a phone will need 15 minutes as well?

danilocesar

Are elephants addicted to social media too?

Reason077

> "elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters" Surely this depends greatly on the size of the dog. I've seen dog poops that are far bigger than that. That 10 ml poop must be from a very small dog!

anongoosey

Something about this with urination too right? Like almost every animal takes the same amount of time?

gvldev

The article says "elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters." Is 10K nearly 20K? Regardless, modern dog breeds vary in size wildly, and I'm curious how they standardize the average fecal volume across the sizes. My dogs are most certainly not expelling just 10 milliliters... I can't imagine that number is even accurate for small dogs.

chasing

Poop like an elephant, pee like a bee.

lo_zamoyski

I was expecting something about Bernoulli's principle.

smusamashah

This reminds of a research that mammals take same amount of time to pee and it was 40 something seconds.

gweinberg

So the reason it takes a human and an elephant about the same amount of time to poop is, the ratio of our poop lengths is about the same as the ratio of our poop velocity? That sounds more like a tautology than an explanation to me.