How poop have contributed to the growth of the world
Millions of years ago, huge land animals roamed the Earth. And those animals—woolly mammoths, huge deer, size of elephants—sought to frequently take breaks from their roaming to deposit massive piles of nutrients at the floor.
In other words, they pooped.
Some of those massive beasts could devour loads of pounds of vegetation each day, they likely pooped massively. Everybody does it, a paper within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that those animals performed a vital feature in maintaining the planet’s nutrient cycle, not directly assisting to fertilize locations a long way past their attain.
the authors wrote
- “Marine mammals, seabirds, anadromous fish, and terrestrial animals probably fashioned an interlinked system recycling vitamins from the sea depths to the continental interiors,”, “with marine mammals moving nutrients from the deep sea to ground waters, seabirds and anadromous fish moving vitamins from the sea to land, and massive animals transferring vitamins away from hotspots into the continental indoors.”
Poop as a fertilizer
Poop can also be used as a fertilizer, and in most cases is used as a cheap alternative to standardized fertilizers available in the market.
- Humans have been repurposing their feces for thousands of years—some more safely than others. Often known by its euphemistic name “night soil,” the most famous example of raw human waste application might be China, where human excrement was used for centuries in an attempt to close the nutrient cycle in their fields, something that agricultural scientist F.H. King cited in the early 20th century as the reason behind China’s seemingly perennial fertility.
It serves as a cheap manure which is helpful to those that have no easy access to fertilizers on the market.