When most people are told to think of the beach they imagine white sand, breezy palm trees and bikini-clad hotties frolicking around without a care in the world…but according to a new study, a more accurate mental picture would be of a cat taking a dump in a litter box. Apparently there’s 100 times as much poop in the sand as there is in the sea, which means that the piece of soft driftwood you stepped on this past weekend? Yeah, that was probably shit. Sorry ‘bout it. According to Daily Mail,
But there’s a hidden danger at seaside resorts that might come as a grotesque surprise – beach sand actually contains more faecal matter than seawater contaminated with sewage.
…Research done by Tao Yan from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has now explained the phenomenon.
…They [researchers] found that microbial communities tended to decay much slower in the simulated beach sand environment than in the water.
Their findings could help explain why more fecal bacteria are found on sandy beaches affected by waste-water pollution than in the waves.
… ‘Enterococci and C. perfringens, but not E. coli, showed significantly smaller decay rates in beach sand than in seawater.
Tl;dr: poop decays faster in the ocean than it does on the beach. That doesn’t mean if you need to take a dump that you should drop trough in the ocean though; just that you, like any reasonable adult, should find a bathroom and not use the beach like a litter box. Pervert.
[H/T Daily Mail]