Panda Poop Can Clean Up Your Crap

If you thought playing around with panda poop is an ignoble thing to do, you'd be right. Do it to extremes and you might just win an Ig Noble Prize, science's version of filmdom's Razzie awards. We can only hope that the research team from Kitasato University in Tokyo consisting of Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei washed their hands before thanking the presenter of their Ig Noble Prize in biology.

Of course, Taguchi and Co. had a firm purpose in mind when they first decided to dig into the mysteries of panda poop. It wasn't actually the poop they were interested in - it just came with the territory - but the microscopic bacteria residing within. Like all poop, panda excrement is made up mainly of bacteria (most of it dead) which formerly made their home in the furry creature's gut and helped it digest the approximately 20-30 pounds of bamboo it downs each day. Giant Pandas space out all that eating with pooping - like 40 times a day, according to Poo News (yes, there is such a site - and you think I'M obsessed).

The researchers figured that panda's intestinal flora must be mighty powerful... YOU try eating a bushel of bamboo; think your puny E. Coli could handle the job? After teasing about 270 different kinds of bacteria out of fresh & fragrant panda dung and testing their ability to break down protein and fat at high temperatures, five super-duper pooper cultivars were isolated and cultured. When sicced onto about 200 pounds of organic garbage and gently shaken (not stirred), the panda protozoa reduced its volume by an incredible 96% leaving nothing more than water, CO2 and some icky sludge - artificial poop, as it were. There's got to be a market for the latter, by the way, since dollar stores do a roaring business selling all kinds of fake crap.

In any case, Taguchi and his intrepid team of poop researchers deserve credit, not criticism, for uncovering a novel method of decomposing residential and commercial organic waste in situ, thus lightening the load on landfills. And the Ig Nobel Prizes? According to the award's originators at Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the intent of the annual awards is to recognize scientific achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

You can read the official, technical report on "Microbial treatment of kitchen refuse with enzyme-producing thermophilic bacteria from Giant Panda feces" - whew, that's a mouthful (gag) - at the Science Direct website. (via Pink Tentacle and Ars Technica).