Once you see the movie title Godzilla vs. Kong, you know you’re not facing a legal Kramer vs. Kramer or The People vs. Larry Flynt showdown – you understand the way the two title characters are played out each other will be violent. What if, instead of fighting each other, the two legendary monsters decided to settle their differences with a “Who Can Make the Biggest Dump” competition? We asked some scientists to weigh the details to determine a winner.
In this corner: King Kong
“Gorillas produce very large amounts of feces,” says Dr. Cat Hobaiter, a primate expert and lecturer at the Center for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution at St. Andrews University, used Mental Floss to use large amounts of often relatively nutrient-poor botanicals to get the resources they needed. “
Gorilla poop is pretty interesting stuff; Scientists use it to find out everything from a gorilla’s diet to its stress levels. Gorillas empty their bowels every few hours; Typically, a 6-foot, 350-pound gorilla would produce about half a pound of feces with each walk (the equivalent of a fairly substantial human stool).
Kong is very, very big. He is 337 feet tall, according to statistics released by the film’s official broadcasters, and, although no weight is reported, in his last big-screen appearance – Kong: Skull Island 2017, set in 1973, before Kong reached adulthood – he was said 158 Weighing tons at a height of 104 feet. It has tripled in that time. Assuming his proportions have stayed largely the same, that means a likely 27-fold weight gain, which now puts him somewhere in the 4,226 ton region. A 350-pound gorilla poops several times a day, each weighing about 0.0016 percent of the animal’s body weight. If Kong does that too, we should expect 6.6 tons of shit. We look at five poops a day, each of which weighs more than an Apache helicopter.
And Kong won’t even look for a skyscraper to hide behind! Unlike some species of monkeys – Dr. Hobaiter tells us that chimpanzees, for example, don’t like to be watched while they defecate – gorillas aren’t fussy about where they poo.
The challenger: Godzilla
What about Godzilla? “I think we can look at the reptilian kingdom to think about what Godzilla’s feces might look like,” says Dr. David A. Steen, reptile and amphibious research director at the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute and author of Secrets Of Snakes, told Mental Floss. “Let’s say Godzilla is most similar to a giant carnivorous lizard, like a monitor lizard – a group of animals that includes Komodo dragons, the largest living lizard. These lizards will eat large but infrequent meals and may toss the indigestible parts like horns and hair in the air and poop out the leftovers. “
Lizards are capable of dropping mind-boggling poop. Everyone remembers where they were in 2020 when they heard of the curly-tailed lizard in Florida that was graciously ripped from its misery when it carried a thick droppings that made up 78.5 percent of its body weight, but it was an extreme case. If Godzilla – 393 feet tall and 99.6 tons – had that much poop in him, he certainly wouldn’t be walking upright.
Lizard poops are not like humans. “We get rid of our nitrogenous wastes through urine, but reptiles don’t, they produce uric acid,” explains Dr. Steen. “This uric acid is usually relatively solid and white and appears as part of the feces.” To a layperson, the fecal matter of a Komodo dragon looks a bit like bird droppings – dark chunks in a white ball.
“Godzilla is a marine animal, so let’s assume he eats fish and various other creatures with soft or hairless bones,” says Dr. Steen. “I would think his poop would be more slimy and watery than solid pieces. Anyone who has previously kept a large lizard or snake as a pet knows that they often relieve themselves in their water bowl. So I’d expect Godzilla to take care of business while he’s in hiding, resulting in a big oily slick. “
And the winner is …
The stool frequency is difficult to train. It is known that Komodo dragons, cold-blooded creatures with a slow metabolism, poop only about 12 times a year. If that’s the case with Godzilla, it’s a big stinky gold medal for Kong. In the world of paleontology, however, there is a debate about whether larger dinosaurs were really cold-blooded (ectothermic) or warm-blooded (endothermic). A 2014 Nature paper assumes that they are somewhere in between and shape the term mesothermal. (Studying the body temperature of really large animals is gleefully referred to as gigantothermia.)
Even with a metabolic rate significantly faster than a Komodo dragon – and the ability to breathe fire suggests a pretty insane biology – Godzilla’s poo frequency is likely significantly lower than Kong’s. That said, if they have a day to poop as much as they want, the gorilla will leave the lizard in the dust.
But let’s be honest: If Godzilla really does a “Who can make the biggest poop?” Competition, the real winner would be cinema.
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