Leo Uesaka, a marine biologist at the University of Tokyo, planned to study how seabirds use their legs to take flight from the ocean surface. In the course of their scientific investigation, Uesaka and his co-author collected nearly 200 instances of the shearwaters pooping. Uesaka’s new estimate of excretion mass per hour is much larger than previous assessments of seabird poop volume, based on land observations. Perhaps the act of flexing and bearing down to become airborne naturally eases the process of going #2 (and #1– birds poop and pee at the same time, through the same hole). Uesaka hopes to conduct follow-up spatial analyses and to repeat the experiment with other seabird species like albatross to determine how widespread the shearwaters’ poop patterns are.