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Utilization of faeces has long been a popular approach for genetic and ecological studies of wildlife. However, the success of molecular marker genotyping and genome resequencing is often unpredictable due to insufficient enrichment of endogenous DNA in the total faecal DNA that is dominated by bacterial DNA. Here, we report a simple and cheap method named PEERS to predominantly lyse animal cells over bacteria by using sodium dodecyl sulphate so as to discharge endogenous DNA into liquid phase before bacterial DNA. By brief centrifugation, total DNA with enriched endogenous fraction can be extracted from the supernatant using routine methods. Our assessments showed that the endogenous DNA extracted by PEERS was significantly enriched for various types of faeces from different species, preservation time and conditions. It significantly improves the genotyping correctness and efficiency of genome resequencing with the total additional cost of $ 0.1 and a short incubation step to treat a faecal sample. We also provide methods to assess the enrichment efficiency of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA and models to predict the usability of faecal DNA for genotyping of short tandem repeat, single‐nucleotide polymorphism and whole‐genome resequencing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Fabula - LhT is the property of Fabula and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article begins with my experience of a Ponderosa pine and centers on an ecological reading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's vision of God and the world as "one reality" in his Ethics. A non-dualistic spirituality embraces aspects of reality Christians typically shun, such as the scatological dimension of our animal lives. I engage these questions through attention to the literal, ethical, socio-economic, and symbolic realities of shit, drawing on the work of Donna Haraway and tracing Martin Luther's carnal sacramentality as well as his scatological repudiation of capitalism. The article honors Bonhoeffer's vision of one reality in attempting to think like a tree: to value the holy plant food our bodies produce and to inhabit ritual practices that make such interspecies valuing and shared life possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen , and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its 'women on top' plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen 's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes' plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its political ideology, large sectors of Israeli society hold the belief that only people who share its ethnocratic values can share the same hygiene identity with it, reflecting its self-perception as a pure national subject. This is the context in which scatological works based on radical materialism and ethical critique first appeared in Israeli performance and video art at the turn of the twenty-first century. The artworks under discussion seek to consider humankind as machines that produce waste, with an emphasis on the excess waste that separates those who are excluded from the dominant Israeli-nationalist-Zionist view or discourse. Some artists employ excrement as a tool to degrade power structures, while others see it as a source of creativity and an alternative way of material and ethical life. Performing feces, or being shit, constitutes a position of creation, observation, and being to which we should pay particular attention at this moment in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines images of the body and laughter in Alain Mabanckou's novel Verre Cassé (2005). Using Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, this discussion highlights how carnivalesque humor operates in the novel through scatological imagery and informal diction. The novel's eponymous writer-protagonist documents tragic tales of his compatriots in a bar that Verre Cassé himself frequents. Through this alcoholic writer wallowing in his own excrement, Mabanckou suspends conventions of literary and social propriety. Images of excretion and copulation, and familiar speech of the "marketplace" punctuate the novel, as Mabanckou draws laughter from the fate of the novel's suffering heroes. I argue that this carnivalesque idiom makes possible an ambivalently utopic world—the black Other who rejects social decorum exists free from but also outside conventional society. As the bar's patrons consume their lives away in alcohol, they forego social decorum, living as social pariahs in the margins of society. By portraying the suffering that afflicts the black African body in resolutely ludic terms, Mabanckou transgresses the grim image of African literature. This ambivalent gesture carnivalizes the dreary realities of postcolonial Congo wrought by both colonization and internal conflict, all-the-while injecting levity where there seems to be no place for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scatological is often relegated to the realm of humor and the juvenile, the transgressive and disturbing nature of the fecal neutralized through its demotion to the basest stratum of humor, where it serves as humor's lowest common denominator, the kind of subject that children delight in. Rather than concede to this narrative, which would make of scatological humor a temporary, Bakhtinian carnivalesque inversion of social norms and order, this article explores what it would mean to take the scatological seriously. To reject the laughter associated with the carnivalesque and decline to take the scatological as comic relief is to claim fecality as the site of a more durable emancipation than the carnivalesque affords, by exploiting fecality's capacity to enable the assimilation of the inassimilable fact of mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La escatología constituye uno de los recursos humorísticos esenciales del teatro del Siglo de Oro a pesar de que la crítica literaria ha tendido a obviar que autores tan consagrados como Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina o Calderón de la Barca mezclaban sus ficciones con materia fecal. Las obras dramáticas demuestran la existencia de procedimientos frecuentes que los dramaturgos utilizaban como lugares comunes y que permiten realizar una clasificación tripartita de motivos escatológicos: los vinculados con la gastronomía, el miedo y la sátira del cortejo. En ellos, el gracioso no es el único blanco de las heces, pero sí la víctima predilecta, pues se enmarca en un sistema que certifica la correspondencia entre la clase inferior, las funciones fisiológicas y las características risibles. Scatology constitutes one of the essential humorous resources of Spanish Golden Age theater, despite the fact that literary criticism has tended to ignore that established authors such as Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca mixed their fictions with feces. The dramatic works prove the existence of frequent procedures that the playwrights used as commonplace and that allow a tripartite classification of scatological motifs: those related to gastronomy, to fear, and to the satire of courtship. In them, the "gracioso" is not the only target of the feces, but the favorite victim, since it is part of a system that certifies the correspondence between the lower class, physiological functions, and laughable characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural roots of an aggrieved white masculinity--white man as victim--run deep in the popular imaginary. Media representation in particular has a long legacy of portraying white male bodies as injured or wounded, dating back to the bloody "hard bodies" of Reagan-era action films. This essay returns to another one of these earlier cultural moments, examining the vulgar physical comedy of the Jackass media franchise as a window into masculine formations in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I examine Jackass's "stupid" white masculinity, which combines bloody self-injury with a scatological logic of bodily incoherence displayed by the show's pissing, shitting, and puking white stuntmen. Viewed retrospectively--against the contemporary horrors of Charlottesville, El Paso, and other places memorialized by Trumpian eruptions of murderous white masculinity--the dumb white dudes of Jackass appear almost a blip in the rearview mirror, now superseded by a return to something far more sinister. Yet Jackass in its own time expressed a hegemonic white masculinity specific to neoliberal and neoconservative forces of the Clinton and Bush years, one organized ambivalently around an excessive anality. This ambivalent anality both parodied national and gendered fantasies of "hardness" at the same time that it drew on dynamics of racial and queer mimesis to reinscribe hegemonic (white/straight) masculinity. However, the more recent development of a queer ecological perspective allows us to revisit the show's scatology, also seeing in it what Nicole Seymour has described as an ethical "counter-phobia" which refuses the nature/culture binary that informs Western culture's deeply embedded erotophobia and somatophobia. This essay takes up the ambivalent anality of Jackass, tracing the ways it has served as precursor to present-day logics of white male grievance, even as its spectacular scatology offers an undertheorized challenge to the cultural revulsion for embodiment and nature that informs all social (gendered, racial, sexual) logics of domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its political ideology, large sectors of Israeli society hold the belief that only people who share its ethnocratic values can share the same hygiene identity with it, reflecting its self-perception as a pure national subject. This is the context in which scatological works based on radical materialism and ethical critique first appeared in Israeli performance and video art at the turn of the twenty-first century. The artworks under discussion seek to consider humankind as machines that produce waste, with an emphasis on the excess waste that separates those who are excluded from the dominant Israeli-nationalist-Zionist view or discourse. Some artists employ excrement as a tool to degrade power structures, while others see it as a source of creativity and an alternative way of material and ethical life. Performing feces, or being shit, constitutes a position of creation, observation, and being to which we should pay particular attention at this moment in time.

This essay examines how ballad song was appropriated to present the demise of the Rump Parliament and commemorate the restoration of the monarchy. Songs not only provide a tune through which words can be performed but also weave together disparate texts through memory of past utterances and performances. The tune "Cook Laurel" establishes a mnemonic connection between parliamentarian figures and ubiquitous rascals in Elizabethan folklore and in Ben Jonson's Gypsies Metamorphosed , performed in 1621. This use of song emphasizes and consolidates representations of parliamentarians as rogues, thus offering royalists a way to lament the regicide and to celebrate the Restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The red-crowned crane Grus japonensis in Hokkaido, Japan forms a closed population as a residence that is independent of the mainland population. Based on observations of a limited number of individuals as well as cranes in captivity, red-crowned cranes are omnivores and eat fish, worms, insects and plants in their own territories except in winter, when they are fed with dent corn that is supplied in eastern Hokkaido. DNA metabarcoding based on high throughput sequencing was carried out using universal primer sets for cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene. Feces from 27 chicks collected in June and July in the period from 2016 to 2018 and intestinal contents from 33 adult and subadult cranes that were found dead almost throughout year in 2006-2013 in the field in eastern Hokkaido were used. Although compositions varied considerably in the cranes, both insects and fish were found in adults and subadults to the same extents, while insects were predominant in chicks. Both insects and fish were detected in all seasons for adults and subadults. Horse flies, scarab beetles and weevils accounted for the most of the insects regardless of the life stage. Dace, stickleback, flatfish and sculpin were the major fish species in adults, while chicks ate almost only stickleback. The results provide the first comprehensive data on carnivorous diets in wild red-crowned cranes in eastern Hokkaido as basis for conservation of red-crowned cranes, for which the life style and area continue to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to conceptualize the interplay between sarcasm, scatology and writing in Darija (Moroccan Arabic or Al-Maghribia) on the web in a post-uprising era. It focuses on the new Darijophone prose that emerged after 20 February 2011 protests in Goud and The Newزحيليكر‎ (The New Bumpkin). Originating with absurdist February 20 movement founder member, Mohammed Sokrat, this writing genre is realist, vulgar, profane, taboo-breaking, and borrows from the toilet space to poke fun at the schizophrenia, herd mentality and populism that attend a modernizing society under a neoliberal regime. A vocabulary of trash, waste, filthy social types and risqué gags has informed a unique online minoritarian prose that is unpopular, yet widely read. This article studies the virtual politics and poetics of dirt and laughter in written Darija. Writing at the interstices of commitment and co-optation, this subcultural mode of knowledge production reveals Moroccan youth's heretofore suppressed yet incessant longing for change in a post-uprising context of disillusionment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Coprophagia is defined in the 32nd edition of Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary as "ingestion of feces; called also coprophagy". A classification scheme for coprophagy types in humans is presented in this review. Methods: Literature on coprophagy, and its affiliated keywords like coprophilia, scatolia and fecal bacteriotherapy, as indexed in the PubMed database and other commercial databases such as Science Direct, Wiley Online and Springer was studied. Results: Two main frames of coprophagy are, intra-species coprography (ingestion of feces solely from Homo sapiens) and inter species coprography. (consumption of animal feces other than H sapiens). Intra-species coprophagy is further subdivided into two distinct types; (a) Autocoprophagy: ingestion of self-produced feces, and (b) Allocoprophagy: Either ingestion or transplantation of feces from other H sapiens individuals. Depending on the route of introduction of feces into the body, two sub categories are identified. Type 1: paraphilia; oral ingestion of feces produced either by 'partners' in consensual sex play or in a transaction between prostitute and customer. Type 2: Clinical treatment of transplantation of feces to patients suffering from Clostridia difficile infection is included in this type. As fecal medicines, inter species coprography prevails in the traditional Han Chinese medicine system and other traditional ethnic medicine systems of China. Conclusion: Most of the coprophagy literature published now, belongs to the category of 'autocoprophagy' in this classification. But other categories also deserve recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of L'Année Ronsardiennne is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract As apex predators, pinnipeds are considered to be useful bioindicators of marine and coastal environments. Endemic to a small archipelago in the South Pacific, the Juan Fernandez fur seal (JFFS) is one of the less‐studied members of the pinniped family Otariidae. This study aimed to characterize the fecal microbiome of the JFFS for the first time, to establish a baseline for future studies of host–microbial–environment interactions and monitoring programs. During two consecutive reproductive seasons, 57 fecal samples were collected from seven different JFFS colonies within the Juan Fernandez Archipelago, Chile. Bacterial composition and abundance were characterized by sequencing the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. The overall microbiome composition was dominated by five phyla: Firmicutes (40% ±24), Fusobacteria (30% ±17), Bacteroidetes (22% ±10), Proteobacteria (6% ±4), and Actinobacteria (2% ±3). Alpha diversity was higher in Tierras Blancas. However, location was not found to be a dominant driver of microbial composition. Interestingly, the strongest signal in the data was a negative association between the genera Peptoclostridium and Fusobacterium, which explained 29.7% of the total microbial composition variability between samples. The genus Peptoclostridium has not been reported in other pinniped studies, and its role here is unclear, with interpretation challenging due to a lack of information regarding microbiome functionality in marine mammals. As a first insight into the JFFS fecal microbiome, these results contribute towards our understanding of the natural microbial diversity and composition in free‐ranging pinnipeds.

It is over 20 years since Marlene van Niekerk published Triomf ([1994] 1999, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball), a satire of the poor white Benade family, who have been bedazzled by apartheid ideology. This iconoclastic satire was published originally in Afrikaans in 1994, the year of the first democratic elections in South Africa. This article offers a close reading of "Peace on Earth", a chapter that desublimates significant sacred icons in Afrikaner cultural mythology and offers a critique of the intricate workings of ideology. Notably, this critique relies upon the abjection of the male Afrikaner's body, in particular that of Treppie Benade. Treppie, the satirist, is found sitting upon the "throne" (toilet) as he purges himself of the lies and illusions of apartheid ideology through a lengthy scatology. This article begins by situating the novel in terms of its commentary on the apartheid government's attempt to rehabilitate the abject of the Afrikaner volk: poor white "trash". It highlights excrement as a master trope of the satirist before analysing the allusions to Judeo-Christian iconography and (e)scatology (invoked in the Great Trek narrative) in terms of their resonances with Louis Althusser's and Slavoj Žižek's concepts of ideology. Further, I explore Treppie's faecal tapestry in terms of an immanent sublime, drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and Friedrich Nietzsche's Dionysian sublime. In conclusion, I consider Treppie's final words and orientation at the end of the novel, and the implications of his Dionysian approach to an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overpopulation of domestic cats (Felis catus) presents a serious concern for wildlife conservationists, animal welfare advocates, public health officials, and community members alike. In cities, free-ranging, unowned cats often form high-density groups (commonly called 'colonies') around human provisioned food sources. While previous diet studies have primarily utilized morphology-based methods, molecular techniques offer a higher resolution alternative. In this study, we used next-generation sequencing techniques to examine the diet composition of feral cats living in five Trap-Neuter-Return colonies located in urban parks on Staten Island, a borough of New York City. We hypothesized that (1) cats living in urban colonies would still consume natural prey despite being regularly fed and (2) that the composition of taxa represented in the diet of each colony would vary, possibly due to differences in prey availability across sites. In total, 16 vertebrate prey taxa were identified in the diet, 13 at the genus level and 3 at the family level. Despite being regularly fed, 58.2% of cat scats contained DNA from natural prey. The diet composition of the cat colonies differed depending on the land cover composition surrounding the colony with the frequency of native prey positively correlated with the proportion of green space and that of non-native prey with developed land cover types. The use of molecular techniques combined with environmental DNA methods offers a promising, non-invasive approach to assessing the diet and consequently, impact of a highly abundant and non-native predator on the persistence of wildlife communities in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Niq Mhlongo's use of scatology in Dog Eat Dog foregrounds his exploration of the temporal affects of disillusionment and disappointment. Drawing together critical and theoretical writing on affect, scatology, the postcolony, and abjection, this article contends that corporeality is symbolically and politically significant in the postapartheid imaginary. This significance is evident throughout Dog Eat Dog, especially in two episodes set in university toilets, which explore through corporeal imagery the topics of racial abjection, vulnerability, and exclusion in postapartheid South Africa. The article draws attention to the affective and political aspects of Mhlongo's excremental postapartheid vision, a feature of his (and others') writing which should not be dismissed, for example, as extraneous or merely comic detail. Implicit in the argument is the call for nuanced readings in postapartheid literature of the body and its processes; these representations of corporeality often signal political inequality and exclusion within the social body itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of L'Année Rabelaisienne is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)