Bodily waste is cool, actually
Snot bubbles may help a short-beaked echidna cool off by coating the critter’s nose with moisture, which evaporates and draws heat from a blood-filled sinus, helping to cool the blood, Elise Cutts reported in “Adorable spike-balls beat the heat with snot bubbles” (SN: 2/11/23, p. 32).
Other animals also have creative ways of using fluids to stay cool. Some birds, for example, urinate on themselves to survive hot days, Cutts wrote. Reader James Wilson noted that the word “urinate” might be misleading, since bird waste is typically a mix of urine and feces.
It’s true that bird droppings are a mix of urine and feces that goes through one opening called the cloaca. So “excrete” might be a more appropriate term, says ornithologist Julián Cabello-Vergel of the University of Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain. For birds that cool off via waste elimination, a phenomenon called urohidrosis, the liquid component of bird droppings is key. When storks, herons, boobies and some other types of birds excrete extra-juicy waste on their legs, “it is the evaporation of the water contained in the excreta which produces heat loss from the [body] to the environment,” Cabello-Vergel says.
When gene flow runs afowl
About 20 to 50 percent of modern jungle fowl DNA comes from domesticated chickens due to interbreeding, threatening the genetic diversity and long-term survival of the wild birds, which live in South and Southeast Asia, Jake Buehler reported in “Chicken DNA runs amok in wild birds” (SN: 2/11/23, p. 14).
Reader Van Snyder asked if wild jungle fowl transfer any of their genetic material to chickens.
Evolutionary biologist Frank Rheindt has “no doubt that gene flow between domestic chickens and wild jungle fowl is bidirectional.” Many free-ranging domestic village chickens in South and Southeast Asia are probably regularly exposed to genes from wild red jungle fowl that they encounter…
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