Why Do Wombats Have Square Poop? New Discovery Reveals How Their “Latrines” May Act Like Dating Apps

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They even stack them up, did you know that? Tidy towers of poop bricks gathered around rocks or logs in the environment. These “latrines” aggregate easily because square poops don’t roll away, but now new research has discovered they may also be a way of communicating with each other.

“There are signs that these latrines are important in wombats,” said Scott Carver, corresponding author of the study and a professor in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, in a release. "They find objects, like logs or large rocks that are prominent points in their landscape, and aggregate their feces around them. We had an inclination that this was about olfactory communication, but there’s just no research out there about it.”

The first stop on their quest to find out was the wombat snoot. You see, in animals that have a great sense of smell we see specific nasal structures like the vomeronasal organ cats have. It's the reason why they make that silly stink face when they smell something interesting, and it turns out wombats have it too.

The next stop took the researchers to wombat latrines so they could gather up some poop cubes and figure out their chemical composition. Using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, they were able to identify chemical signatures that could act like pheromones, sharing information about other wombats in the local area.

“We were able to show that there are individually distinct chemical signatures – or individual odors – in wombat poo,” said Carver. “Wombats have good sensory structures for smell and individually distinct chemical mixtures, so they can probably tell individuals apart.”

It seems what to you and I just look like stacks of anonymous wombat poo are actually a kind of guest book for these animals, telling them who is in the area and when new individuals have arrived. Like a dating app – only without the phones and with loads of feces – these latrines could reveal the ages, sexes, and reproductive statuses of wombats in the area. It’s an effective way of remote networking for an otherwise solitary creature.

There’s more research to be done in establishing what each of the 44 distinct compounds identified in the study means to a wombat, but Carver hopes it’ll reveal a new side to one of Australia’s most loved animals.

“What makes this relatable is that a lot of us have pets like cats and dogs, and we see them sniffing forever at a bush, and we know they are getting something that we don’t know,” Carver said. “They have this much more complex world of smell.”

“And, here we have wombats, this quirky, iconic animal from Australia that lives a solitary. If you’re a solitary animal, how do you communicate with others around you?”

Forget Bumble, whip out your bum.

The study is published in the Journal Of Zoology.