It’s time to give a crap about crap. To save animals, we need to save their poop. If a bear shits in the woods and a scientist is there to collect it, where will it be stored? The Poop Ark!
A space of functional beauty, the Poop Ark would preserve droppings, chips, turds, pies, frass, scat, guano, and dung from the whole animal kingdom, waiting to be probed and studied. Scientists could make deposits or check out specimens from a diverse collection of casks and vials—the world’s most comprehensive collection of preserved poo. Its walls would be smooth and cool, and its visitor log would read like a who’s who of biological science. It would be in parts a museum collection, library, time capsule, and monument.
As of today, the Poop Ark is only my (clogged) pipe dream. But we need to start building it soon. Each year as more of Earth’s animals drop their species’ last deposit, its potential collection diminishes.
Poop is much more than waste to be flushed and forgotten. In her book The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, Lina Zeldovich describes how Japanese farmers once paid for human feces to fertilize fields, or risked jail time to steal it. Our poop can help us track disease outbreaks and drug use, quantify environmental pollutants, learn about our ancient ancestors, and even treat diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.
Until 2021, Boston residents who completed OpenBiome’s rigorous screening for fecal transplant donors could earn as much as $13,000 annually from their high-quality outputs, which the company used to create treatments for people suffering from persistent gut infection. According to its 2020 annual report, in that year the company shipped 3,445 fecal microbiota transplantation treatments to more than 1,250 hospitals and clinics across the US.
Animal poops are similarly prized by scientists as a window into an animal’s identity, diet, movements, stress state, sex, maturity, reproduction, habits, predator–prey relationships, overall health, pollution exposure, parasites, and microbiome. Poop can tell us things about its creator that no other specimen can. In a recently published paper on captive mink feces, microbial ecologist Erin McKenney and colleagues found discernible differences between the stools of males and females, and minks of different social status. In 2017, researcher Karen DeMatteo used scat samples from jaguars, pumas, ocelots, oncillas, and bush dogs to identify the best places to build wildlife corridors across a broad area of northeastern Argentina.
“You can learn a lot from fecal samples,” says Isa-Rita Russo, a conservation geneticist at Cardiff University. She has one student working on an improved method to extract parasite eggs from buffalo chips (surely a dream assignment), and another using feces to compare stress levels between wild, zoo, and public engagement cheetahs.
Fecal plumes are like gold to whale researchers, who must try to extract information from a legally protected giant traveling vast distances unseen through an opaque and often dangerous environment. Marine mammal protection laws prohibit harassment, hunting, capturing, collecting, or killing whales, so the study of live whales is very much the study of their poo. Marine ecologist Matthew Savoca snags whale poop to study microplastic pollution and recently published research in Nature showing that baleen whales eat therefore and poop up to three times more than we thought.
All this cannot be flushed into the earth: It needs to be saved. According to a 2019 press release from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment, “one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.” The World Wildlife Fund’s 2020 Living Planet Index similarly reports massive die-offs: “The world has seen an average 68 percent drop in mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations since 1970.”
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Scientists are working to catalog what’s here before it’s gone. And those with questions about the poops of animals past will be out of luck, because, as McKenney says, “There's no museum's specimen collection that we can mine because nobody’s been keeping poop around.” A poop ark would preserve information about these animals and the microbes inside them. Right now, “there’s no effort to conserve microbes,” says microbial ecologist Candace Williams. People tend to focus on the parts of the animal they can see, she says, but “we need to think about all the things that support that animal host, which are the microbes that live within it.”
As species continue to decline, noninvasive sampling will become increasingly critical. Skin, hair, blood, urine, and saliva hold unique clues, but one attribute of poop is that picking it up does no harm to the animal. Christopher Meyer, a research zoologist and curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, sees museum collections at an inflection point. As animal numbers dwindle, each one becomes more precious, and collectors must think hard about the ethics of killing to preserve. “If you're going to take a creature's life, you need to maximize the gain,” he says. “Most bird species in the world we've collected. Most plant species in the world we've collected. And I would argue, we still do need to collect stuff to learn about the natural world, but we can start asking different questions of that information.”
Scientists working on de-extinction, using DNA to bring back extinct animals like the mammoth, might also consider the importance of ancient poops. “Whether we are breeding individuals in captivity, in the hopes of restoring some genetic fallback or releasing captive-bred individuals into the wilds … if you don't have the gut microbes to support your highly specialized diet it may not work,” McKenney says. If we want to bring back our critically endangered species, it would be prudent to save some of their poop. Without healthy gut flora, animals brought back could wither. According to Jessica Ware, an associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History, “We know so little about the diet of most animals … Losing their fecal information means we cannot reconstruct their diets, or microbiomes, and these ecological data will be forever missing.”
A poop ark would preserve all this information for research, potential de-extinction, and possibilities we can’t even envision. It could store fecal samples from as many of Earth’s species as possible, and recalling McKenney’s research, should contain multiple samples from males and females. It might work as a kind of fecal lending library, allowing researchers with less funding and fewer connections to “check out” poops and use them to answer questions. Many major science museums already have procedures in place for loans of animal tissues or whole specimens from their collections. And if poops are stored long-term, such a repository could allow researchers to track changes in species over time.
A poop ark for people already exists. The Global Microbiome Conservancy, founded in 2016, “is an international nonprofit initiative collecting and preserving the biodiversity of human gut microbes for future generations,” according to its website. Citing common use of antibiotics, sanitizers, and propensity for processed food, our native, friendly microbes may soon go extinct, it says. If so much diversity exists just within us, think of all the good stuff we are missing in the poop of thousands of species of our animal friends.
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I envision a concrete monolith nestled against a frigid mountainside, giant poop emoji hanging over the door. I walk inside blown by a gust of wind, wave my card in front of a digital keypad, and get a receipt for the aisle and shelf my requested poop is on.
Many scientists I spoke with poo-pooed the idea, preferring a decentralized system of smaller, localized poop repositories (suppositories?). A network of smaller arks would help solve issues over ownership and access, international shipping, permitting, and catastrophic damage in the case of an emergency. Many museums are already moving toward a decentralized model, Meyers says, as they begin to acknowledge the colonial underpinnings of centralized collections. “People should be preserving the species that are native to their land, and it's the same for the microbes,” Williams says. “I think having a decentralized network would be really, really amazing.”
But centralization has its perks. Scientists interested in poop from many geographic regions would only need to come to or query the one Poop Ark, resources could be pooled to create a large space with the best possible preservation systems, and standardization could help ensure that each poop was collected, stored, and labeled according to agreed-upon best practices. The collection could be digitized and updated for access online.
Such an effort would require a great deal of cooperation, infrastructure, and money, to say nothing of the difficulties of collecting the samples in the first place. “Sometimes it's just a blessing in itself just to get a sample,” says McKenney. Even at the Duke Lemur center under “ideal” conditions sometimes all she got was “the world's smallest Q-tip for the world's smallest little newborn butt.”
Out in nature, challenges compound. “You see a stiff tail—universal sign of pooping—right?” McKenney says. “And then you’re like, ‘Oh! Oh! Shit's going to happen!’ Then you're going to sprint through the dense undergrowth and find where the pellets fell? I mean, they’re worth their weight in plutonium in the eyes of the ecologist who collected them.” After all that effort a researcher might not want to give half their specimens away, she says.
The best way to store poop long-term would be to keep it very cold, at or below –80 degrees Fahrenheit, or about the temperature of a nice winter’s day in the Arctic. This is how the Global Seed Vault, an ark for food plants housed in a mountain near the north pole, and the Global Microbiome Conservancy, an initiative collecting and preserving the biodiversity of human gut microbes from around the world, preserves their treasures. But that’s not so easy in the middle of nowhere. As McKenney says, “Are you going to drag around a 75-pound dewar full of liquid nitrogen? No.” Plus, a poop collection is not the most charismatic of projects. “You don't open a drawer and go, ‘Wow, look at all that poop!’” Meyer says.
Insect researcher Caroline Chaboo’s insects (and any poops) are mostly stored in ethanol, the drinkable alcohol. But over time, ethanol evaporates, can destroy organic material, and is highly flammable. If you don’t check every few months, Chaboo says, “that collection becomes like a bomb.” Such an effort would require time and funding for collecting, preserving, and maintaining the samples, and basic science funding, especially for less sqee-worthy animals remains … constipated. “It all boils down to money,” says Chaboo. “When you think of insects, most museums don't even have collections of the eggs and the larvae and the pupae.”
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For now, there are too many other things to spend limited resources on. “Poop is just so far from what a museum would collect,” Chaboo says. Such an undertaking would likely need multiple funding sources. The Earth Microbiome Project, for example, is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Argonne National Laboratory, Australian Research Council, and National Science Foundation. “It would likely be launched through, I don't know, the American Society for Microbiologists,” McKenney says. “There are certainly marketing opportunities to recruit all the people who might contribute to the repository once it is formed.”
To get around the need for deep pockets, many experts agreed that poop samples could be incorporated into the DNA and tissue banks and museum collections we already have. “My default setting would be say make use of existing data resources and infrastructures unless there is a very good, compelling reason to invent something new,” says Tim Hirsch, the deputy director of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat.
Meyer is excited about a new paradigm of collection in which, instead of searching for a representative sample of each species, scientists create a slice of time in an ecosystem. “Natural history museums exist to be the library of life,” he says. But rather than going out to net an example of every species in the world, Meyer says, curators are moving toward trying to capture the system: air, water, soil, plants, animals, poop.
“I don't think it's a completely bizarre, crazy idea,” Russo says. But so many worthy projects go unfunded, so many important things go uncollected and unsaved, that this one might not be the most pressing. In a perfect world, Chaboo says, “I would love to see it,” but “for now my poop ark is in my office, because I know nobody else is going to love them the way I do.”