Scientists around the world have teamed up to carry out one of mankind’s most important missions: compiling a spreadsheet that helpfully sorts animals based on whether or not they fart. Since you’ve surely wondered if, say, salamanders or domestic hedgehogs indeed expel gas out of their anuses, real researchers—with actual doctorates and everything—have taken it upon themselves to cast their actual work aside in favor of editing the “Does It Fart?” database. And we thank them for it, because they’re doing God’s work.
How did this endeavor start, you ask? One day, a curious family member asked Danielle Rabaiotti, a Ph.D. student at the Zoological Society of London, if snakes farted, according to Gizmodo. She was stumped, so she fired off the question to David Steen, an ecologist at Auburn University. When Steen begrudgingly answered on Twitter with a simple “<sigh> yes.” fellow scientists joined in on the fun and flexed their expertise to reveal the other animals that rip ass.
Seizing his moment, University of Alabama Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Caruso created the “Does It Fart?” spreadsheet to gather all the scientists’ answers in one place. (He then presumably made room on his mantle for a Nobel Prize.) “I figured the best way to find out if a particular animal farts would be to ask the people who spend the most time with them,” Caruso told Gizmodo. “Which includes people who study them, or maybe people who keep them at home, or just happened to hear one fart.”
Now we know that frogs don’t audibly fart due to weak sphincters, manatees do it “near constantly,” and snow leopards’ butt rumbles are silent, but deadly. “Their fluffy bottoms help to muffle the sound,” writes one anonymous user.
The spreadsheet is enlightening, and we encourage you to browse through it. Because hey, if smart scientists can waste time at work with farts, so can you.
