Archive
SURPRISING BOTTOMS
05/06/2025
All the concern about the shocking state of our rivers and sewage pollution started me thinking about where most of it arises. Recalling days of study for my degree in Human Biology and the lectures on the gut and excretion, recently saw some fascinating new research[1]. It seems, from a genetic analysis by Andreas Hejnol at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, that evolution may have combined what was an orifice for the release of sperm (a “gonopore”) with the gut to form the anus. Primitive animals had no separate orifice to eject waste from digestion so had to discharge it through their mouths (some such as jellyfish still do). The gonopore only exists in males but is juxtaposed to the gut and, although the exact evolutionary pathway is uncertain, the two are believed to have fused to form a single anus, leading to the anatomy of all mammals and evolutionarily advanced animals today, bearing witness to its great evolutionary success.
[1] For some technical detail, see the paper at doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.10.637358 and the New Scientist article by Michael Le Page of 28 March 2025.
The treatment of the excretions of this remarkable structure at the end of our gut are an altogether more pressing problem, though. The sewage-contaminated state of our waterways is a national disgrace and, when one reads that the UK Government were not even prepared to protect our unique chalk streams in their latest naïve legislative planning and infrastructure proposals, it beggars belief. We can only hope that the pressure by all the wildlife and environmental groups and the legal counsel advising them will lead to a rethink of this shocking Planning and Infrastructure Bill. If you feel as I do, please write to your MP about it. You can read much more about this on the web, for example at https://shorturl.at/JZWql.
Betts Ecology are always interested in the frontiers of research and the application of discoveries. We just wish that there were many more scientists in the UK government, and more environmental and ecological knowledge applied to legislation.
