2025-08-19 16:07:36

Seabirds poo every four minutes.

A team from the University of Tokyo has discovered that the birds relieve themselves every four to 10 minutes and almost always answer calls of nature when they are in the air.

The experts made the findings accidentally as they had initially set out to study how the seabirds run along the surface of the water during takeoff.

Leo Uesaka, the lead author of the research, said: “While watching the video, I was surprised to see that they dropped faeces very frequently.

“I thought it was funny at first, but it turned out to be more interesting and important for marine ecology. We don’t know why they keep this excretion rhythm, but there must be a reason.”

The team strapped small backward-facing cameras to the stomachs of 15 streaked shearwater birds and recorded almost 200 ‘defecation events’.

They found that the birds nearly always relieved themselves during flight and that the animals sometimes only took off for a toilet break before returning to the water.

The experts suspect that the habit spares the birds from dirtying their feathers and is easier than trying to defecate in a floating position.

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