THE BEGINNING OF

THE END
Weve got the origin of the anus all wrong,
says Chelsea Whyte

OMB jellies are wondrous, magical

creatures. Their translucent,
spherical bodies are lined with
iridescent cilia, which they use to motor
around the ocean deep and suck in vast
quantities of zooplankton. They are
some of the most primitive animals
on the planet, closely descended
from the common ancestors of all
animal life. The surprising thing is that
they have an anus. Two, even. Together,
these tiny holes are rewriting our
understanding of how anuses ever
came to be.
This is as yet a short story: for all its
essential functions, the anus is a very
understudied organ. We do know there
are only a few basic ways that animals
defecate (see Gut thinking, page 52).
Humans and plenty of other creatures
have a through-gut, which starts at
the mouth and ends at the sphincter.
This cheek-to-cheek nutrient highway
runs relatively straight through the
body, and is generally de rigueur
for creatures that have a front and
back, right and left sides, and an
upside down.
For animals that lack this bilateral
symmetry sponges, stinging jellyfish,
anemones the digestive system is

50 | NewScientist | 17/24/31 December 2016

more like a cul-de-sac, a fitting turn of

phrase for what is essentially a bag into
which food flows, gets digested and
then must be expelled before more can
be consumed.
Comb jellies used to be considered
part of the second group, with just one
portal for shits and giggles. And since
several lines of evidence suggest they
are our best representatives of the
ancestor of all animals, the very first
animals were also assumed to have
lacked an anus. In a way, that made

What the researchers

thought was excrement
turned out to be vomit
sense. On the surface at least, a
through-gut seems a more advanced
solution to digestion than a system in
which waste comes out of the same
orifice the food went in.
But things are not always what they
seem. In remarkable videos released
last year, evolutionary biologist
William Browne at the University of
Miami in Florida captured the first

definitive evidence that the primitive

comb jellies had a through-gut.
The experiment was simple. His
team fed comb jellies with zebrafish
that had been genetically engineered to
glow in the dark, and used time-lapse
photography to see what happened
next. The set-up meant the biologists
could see which cells were absorbing
nutrients from the zebrafish. It just lit
up the entire digestive system, Browne
says. And we saw them poop. The
jellies had not one but two anuses.
The researchers were taken aback.
It just didnt chime with the accepted
wisdom, says Browne. The comb jellies
should have regurgitated the zebrafish
waste out of their mouths instead of
excreting it through different pores. It
wasnt until they went back to research
published over 150 years ago that they
found accounts matching what they
were seeing. In 1850, a naturalist
named Louis Agassiz had published
observations of comb jellies, or
ctenophores, with digestive tract
openings opposite their mouths.
The truth had been staring biologists
in the face all along. Comb jellies are
transparent, says Browne. If you
really look at them, you see the anal >

TOM GAULD

17/24/31 December 2016 | NewScientist | 51

BRANDON COLE/NATUREPL

jellies excrete through not just one

but two anal pores. The revelation
suggests that far from being a
relatively recent innovation, the
through-gut originated with the
earliest animals.
The real mystery then is why some
animals lack an anus. According to
Andreas Hejnol, an evolutionary
biologist at the University of Bergen
in Norway, those that do live in cold
water, have slow metabolisms and
dont need much food to survive. Over
millennia of evolution, they lost the
superfluous exit to their digestive tract.
Brachiopods a sort of mostly extinct
clam are one example. The presence
of thin tissue at their rear reveals they
once had an opening.

One ring to rule them all

GUT THINKING
Broadly speaking, animals defecate in one
of two ways. You have either two orifices, or
just the one in which case you are probably
a sponge, a coral or a sea anemone.
There are variations on these themes. In
some stationary animals, such as barnacles,
a twist in the gastric geometry creates a
U-shaped gut with an exit ramp just next
to the mouth. Snails are also afforded the
luxury of a separate orifice for excrement,
but dignity doesnt ensue. Their crap chute
follows the curvature of their shell, so the
digestive tract deposits dung directly
behind their heads. Evolution has also
devised temporary anuses that lack a
sphincter: instead, a flap of tissue closes the
rear opening after each defecation. Tiny jaw
worms have this sphincter-free opening,
though researchers have yet to see it in use.
Stranger still, some species of face mites
dont have an anus at all. These minuscule
critters just eat and eat until they die, their
bodies exploding like tiny poo grenades.

Sea anemones:
food goes in
onehole, waste
comes out the
same hole

Face mites eat and eat until

they die, their bodies exploding
like tiny poo grenades
52 | NewScientist | 17/24/31 December 2016

pores. There was just a fundamental

misunderstanding of their use.
Browne says many scientists simply
didnt believe that these pores were
used as the primary exit for waste,
and so perpetuated the myth that
ctenophores lacked a second opening.
His study, published this October,
finally laid that myth to rest with the
observation of sphincters strikingly
similar to our own.
Why, you might ask, did researchers
so fervently believe that comb jellies
lacked an anus? For more than a
hundred years, they had seen them
expelling stuff through their mouth
and assumed it was excrement. It
turned out to be vomit. Comb jellies eat
constantly and the ones grown in labs
simply hoovered up whatever was in
front of them, which was far more
food than they could hold. It sounds
crazy, but I think they were making
observations on animals that were
in really bad shape, Browne says.
In March, he showed up to the
Ctenopalooza conference in St
Augustine, Florida, with his videos
(see newscientist.com). Gasps filled
the packed room of evolutionary
biologists as they watched the comb

Six hundred million years ago, many

things happened in animal evolution,
a lot of diversification, says Hejnol.
We know that 500 million years ago,
there were already animals that had an
anus. So in this time frame, maybe one
or several anuses evolved in different
animals, but we dont know how often
it happened.
For all the mystery about when the
anus and through-gut evolved, the why
is much clearer. Larger animals need
more fuel to grow and live, and beyond
a certain gut length it becomes less
efficient to cycle waste back up to the
mouth. In humans, for instance,
nutrients are mostly absorbed in the
lower gut, so waiting for food to digest
down there and then come all the way
back up would be a waste of time and
energy. Plus, if your digestive tract has
a separate exit, you can eat a second
meal while youre still digesting
the first, meaning more energy to
fuel the body. The anus is truly an
evolutionary marvel.
The brain is the organ that uses up
most of our energy, says Hejnol. If we
didnt have such an efficient digestive
system, we wouldnt have a brain and
we couldnt even think about how the
anus came about. Our anus allows us to
think about us. Ponder that the next
time youre on the toilet.
Chelsea Whyte knows her backside from
herelbow