Most people begrudgingly pick up their pet's poo for the sake of the greater good.
But Dr Romane Cristescu, a self-proclaimed poo science evangelist, delights in the discovery of fresh animal excrement.
She says the clues that wildlife leave behind can help researchers find out more about elusive creatures.
"A lot of the time we end up looking for the signs of them, and often that is in poo or scat," she tells ABC RN's Counterpoint.
Dr Cristescu is a research fellow in ecology at the University of the Sunshine Coast, who studies koalas by observing their faecal matter.
She says "poo and spew" can reveal important information about an animal's health and diet by identifying the genetic material present.
Animals also use poo as their own messaging system, she adds.
"Basically, they have scents in their waste that says 'I'm male or female and ready to breed'. Or 'I'm a big boy, don't come near me'," Dr Cristescu says.
While most animals defecate within their close environment in order to mark their territory, other animals, for example the hippopotamus, take more of a scattered approach.
The gross things animals do
In the hope of encouraging more young people to take an interest in science, Dr Cristescu has teamed up with author Nic Gill to write a children's book called Poo, Spew and Other Gross Things Animals Do.
In their research, they discovered that animals sometimes have funny ways of protecting themselves.
An unsuspecting diver found this out the hard way.
Dr Cristescu recounts the story of Keri Wilk, who was diving off the coast of Dominica in the Caribbean in 2015 when he saw a sperm whale.
"[Mr Wilk] approached a whale and the whale started to defecate an enormous amount … it turned on itself quite rapidly until that poo covered the whole area and made it disappear," she says.
When speaking to the BBC afterwards, Mr Wilk said he thought the whale's 'poo-nado' was some sort of defence mechanism.
Self defence is also behind the evolution of some quirky features of members of the animal kingdom.
Take the bird-dropping spider for example. It uses the power of poo to avoid its predators, according to Dr Cristescu.
"It looks pretty unappealing … that name says it all," she says, explaining that it has evolved this way in order to elude predators.
"It spends a lot of time on its web waiting for food to come around, but meanwhile [it's] open to predators. [So] the more it looked like poo, the better chance it has of survival," she explains.
Odd mating rituals
Animals can also do quite bizarre things when they are trying to find a partner or when looking after their young.
For Dr Cristescu, the mating rituals of lobsters are a good example. When the female lobster is looking to mate, she has a strange way of attracting a partner.
"The way she does that, which is quite unusual, is to wee on the male's head because in her wee are all those communication keys," she says.
It's a funny thing to observe, Dr Cristescu says.
Then there are the chicks of the Eurasian roller bird who, when threatened, spew a foul-smelling orange liquid all over themselves.
"They discovered if they just vomit on themselves, they are not very nice smelling and are unlikely to be eaten by the predator," Dr Cristescu says.
This not only deters the predator, but it also warns the birds' parents.
"It's a pretty clever thing, because when you're a baby bird, there's not a lot you can do," the ecologist says.
"We think that vomit is used as an emergency beacon to warn the parents that there is a threat around."
'Favourite on the gross front'
According to Ms Gill, the most cringeworthy behaviour she observed among the animals she's researched was that of the naked mole rat.
These bald-looking mammals live in underground tunnel systems in Africa and are rarely seen above ground.
Each colony has a "great big fat queen" who can grow up to twice the size of the other naked mole rats.
"They've also got a public toilet chamber, where they will go to poo in, which sounds really hygienic until you find out what they actually do in it," Ms Gill says.
"They all go and roll around in the shared latrine chamber so they all smell the same. [This is] because occasionally another colony will accidentally burrow through and they will end up joining their tunnel networks.
"And if they encounter someone who smells different to them, they go to war with one another with these nasty yellow fangs," she explains.
Sometimes naked mole rats eat their own poo. It's something rabbits and a lot of other herbivores will also do as it allows them to get maximum nutrition out of it.
But, in the ultimate foul act, the queen mole rat recruits her babysitters by feeding them her poo.
"[The queen] has a bunch of babies but because she's the queen, she's like, I'm not looking after those," she says.
"So she feeds her female servants her own poo and basically brainwashes them into becoming full-time babysitters.
Ms Gill explains this is because there are hormones in the faeces that cause the other naked mole rats to look after the royal babies as if they were their own.
"[Naked mole rats] are my absolute favourite on the gross front … they're very odd," she says.
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