Do unborn babies pee and/or defecate in the womb? –Realtime, via e-mail
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Urine production begins late in the first trimester, about the same time the two-inch embryo becomes a fetus. In the second half of pregnancy, fetal urine is an important constituent of amniotic fluid. By the time the kid is about ready to pop out, he or she is passing roughly a liter a day. Where does it go? Seems kids learn the benefits of recycling early on–they swallow it. They’d better, too, lest polyhydramnios (a potentially dangerous buildup of fluid volume) result. When fetal urination is impaired, the opposite complication, oligohydramnios, usually occurs.
Fetal defecation isn’t normal, but fetuses do accumulate a mass of greenish feces, called meconium, in their intestines. Unlike the adult version, meconium is sterile and odorless, though still pretty icky, and the sight of it in the newborn nursery starkly reminds a new parent–not infrequently dad, since mom at this point is often out of it–that his life has entered a dramatic new phase. (Nurses invariably offer to clean things up. Let ’em.) I know what you’re thinking: there’s nothing much to nosh on in there, so where’s this stuff coming from? Various endogenous and swallowed sources: mucus, bile, intestinal epithelial cells, lanugo (fine body hairs that are normally shed before birth), and vernix caseosa (a lubricating sebaceous secretion of the skin).
Now, Daniel. As this column has previously established, in at least a couple detective stories the butler did do it. Likewise, online sources of seeming reliability state that there’s one, though possibly only one, representation of the earth from the era of exploration on which one may find the phrase “here be dragons”–to be precise, the Latin equivalent, HC SVNT DRACONES. The words are said to be inscribed on the Lenox Globe (circa 1503-’07), an engraved copper sphere owned by the New York Public Library and on display in the Edna Barnes Salomon Room. However, we could find no useful photos, and you know what lying weasels online folk sometimes are. So we decided to check for ourselves. Our NYC-based operatives couldn’t get off work in Jersey, but we reached Rebecca Federman, NYPL social-sciences bibliographer, who says (a) the globe is small (12.7 centimeters) and dark and you can’t tell much from looking at it in the display case, but (b) photographs of the globe taken for research show the above words appear on the coast of Southeast Asia. Thanks, Rebecca. You want me to spell you for an hour at the reference desk, say the word.
