Who Dung It? and Fascinating Scat Fact

On Saturday, Alex & I went to the Sims Bayou Nature Center as they kicked off their Family Days. They will be having a Family Nature Day one Saturday a month during the school year and we're excited about it! 

One of the things we did was play a fun game called "Who DUNG it?" They actually had frozen animal & insect scat for the kids to identify!!! Alex got called up to guess this dung. She'd actually seen the lady take a bite of this one (!) and had guessed it was a brownie (because she'd seen brownie scat before), but this looked different. She wasn't sure what it was.

But, it turned out to be chocolate dung! (And, yes it was yummy... it even had some kind of berry in it! I will try to get the recipe.) We even learned some fascinating scat facts like:

• Koala scat actually smells good... because all they eat is eukalyptus!
• Mistle toe makes scat very sticky... so sticky that an animal will have to wipe on a tree... which is what the mistle toe needs to grow on a tree where it wants to be!
• The largest scat in the world is from the blue whale. (Alex got this question right!)
• Some animals, such as rabbits and rodents, have to eat their own (or their parent's) scat. This is because the plants they eat are so hard to digest efficiently, that they must digest it twice!
• Some kind of insect (a fly) actually doesn't ever produce dung! It only lives a day. So, the book "Everybody Poops" is a little deceptive.

I wish I could remember more of the facts, but I did request the book Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable by Davies which the leaders used. It looks fascinating! And, it is a fascinating topic!