Fact: Rabbits are GROSS!

Perhaps I should be begin with a warning... Warning: You will never view rabbits the same way after reading this. Don't read if you want to continue thinking of rabbits as cute, cuddly, perfectly adorable little things or if you have a weak stomach. Ok, you may still think of them as cuddly at the end, but probably not quite so cute. 

Fact: Remember the other week when I mentioned how cows deal with cellulose in their diets? Well, the same general problem exists for many rodents, like rabbits and hares. They've got to digest the cellulose in order to get the maximum nutrition from all those plants their munching. However, they don't have the advantage of that extra stomach for fermenting things like cows do. Instead, rabbits deal with the issue by eating their food twice. But not by regurgitating it for rumination, this time. Rabbits eat their own poop. Incidentally, there is a special word for this: coprophagy. Rabbits produce two types of feces--the hard pellets you normally see, plus a softer, lighter, and larger feces that they eat directly off their anus so that it can be digested again. Once it is swallowed, the feces makes its way to the stomach where it's sequestered behind a mucus membrane at one side of the stomach for fermentation. Yup, the poop just sits there in the stomach fermenting for hours before being pooped out for the last time. Just let that idea ferment in your brain for a little as you see all the bunnies appearing in time for Easter. 

Fact: Drooling Cows

Fact: Cows produce tons of saliva. Ok, not literal tons but lots and lots of the stuff. See, cows happen to like to eat grass. The problem with eating grass is the amount of cellulose in it. Different animals that use cellulose as a source of food have different mechanisms for dealing with digesting the stuff and cows, as you may know, deal with it by being ruminants. First, they ruminate, or chew their cud. Basically, you chew your food once, swallow it, let it sit in your rumen for a few hours, and bring it back up to chew again. Second, they have that rumen. The rumen is essentially a fermentation vat where microorganisms help break down cellulose so it's possible for the cows to digest further. The byproducts of this fermentation are carbon dioxide and methane which the cows let out by burping (technical term=eructation. You can now sound super smart when you ask your little brother to stop eructing at the dinner table). But we aren't worried about the byproducts. Those aren't helping the cow get energy and they aren't why they need so much saliva. The fermentation products are mostly acetic acid, propionic acid, and butyric acid. Notice something there? Acid. Well, "copious amounts of saliva" (as stated in my Animal Physiology textbook by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen) are produced by ruminants to help buffer all these acids in the rumen. In a smaller ruminant, like a sheep or goat, the amount of saliva produced per day has been estimated to be around 6-16 liters. In a cow, the estimated amount of saliva produced per day is around 100-190 liters. That's 26-50 gallons of saliva per day! 

Sea Turtle Conference!

As the rest of school prepares for midterms and my poor fellow music people spend their Sunday in juries, I am out in Maryland for the week! Remember those sea turtles I spent all summer watching? 

This week Robyn and I are attending the International Sea Turtle Society's 33rd Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation. We both created posters about the work we did this summer in Honduras and we'll be presenting them at the conference. Robyn's poster is about the beach profiling that we did on Utila and in Cuero y Salado examining possible similarities between nesting beaches and potential nesting beaches as far as the slope of the beach and the vegetation on the beach. My poster is part of a special session the conference is just starting this year. The session has to do with the work volunteers do in sea turtle conservation so my poster is about the five volunteers (including Robyn and I) who worked with ProTECTOR in Honduras this summer, what they did, and the benefits of having volunteers. 

The conference website says they're expecting over 1000 participants from at least 75 countries for this year's conference. Seeing as the last conference I attended was all of about 80 people, this is going to be quite an experience!

Excused truancy for a conference! Yay!

The finished poster.