Why a tapir, of all things?
Three reasons, and they stack.
The name. Tanya is Malay for to ask, which is her whole job on the landing page — she asks what brought you here. It also happens to read as an ordinary name in English, so nobody has to be taught how to say it. Our discovery platform is Teroka, Malay for to explore; the two names come from the same language on purpose.
The animal. The Malayan tapir is the Asian tapir — the one from the part of the world Teroka is named in. Its real markings are exactly what she wears: a dark animal with a pale saddle across the middle, like a rugby ball that has been half-dipped in cream. On our site the cream is brand teal, but the pattern is the species' own.
The gut. Tapirs are hindgut fermenters. The back end of their digestive tract is a fermentation vat, run by bacteria, that turns leaves into energy. We make ingredients that steer the same kind of bacteria in the human gut. A fibre-fermenting animal was the honest choice of mascot, and it took very little looking to find one.
Tapir 101
- They are not pigs, and not anteaters. Tapirs are odd-toed ungulates — order Perissodactyla — which makes their closest living relatives horses and rhinoceroses. Four toes on each front foot, three on each back foot.
- They are very old. The tapir body plan has hardly changed in tens of millions of years. Palaeontologists reach for the phrase living fossil, and for once it is fair.
- There are four living species (five, if you count a disputed one): three in Central and South America, and the Malayan tapir in Southeast Asia — Malaysia, Sumatra, Thailand and Myanmar. It is the largest of them, at several hundred kilograms.
- The nose is a hand. That short trunk is a prehensile proboscis: it grabs leaves, strips shoots and feels around for fruit. Tapirs are also strong swimmers, and will walk along a river bed with the trunk raised as a snorkel.
- Calves are watermelons. Every tapir is born with pale stripes and spots on a dark coat — forest-floor camouflage that fades over the first months into the adult pattern.
- They plant forests. Tapirs eat a lot of fruit and walk a long way, and what comes out the other end is seed plus fertiliser. Ecologists call them gardeners of the forest.
- They are in trouble. The Malayan tapir is listed as Endangered; habitat loss is the reason. Tapirs have a day — 27 April — for exactly this.
The fermentation part
This is the fun bit, and the part that matters.
No mammal can digest cellulose — the tough stuff that leaves and stems are made of. Every plant-eater that lives on it has outsourced the job to microbes, and the only question is where in the gut the microbes get to work.
Cows do it up front. A cow's stomach has a fermentation chamber — the rumen — before the acid stomach and the small intestine. The bacteria go first, the cow digests the bacteria and their products afterwards, and to give them enough time it brings the food back up to chew again. Thorough, slow and efficient: that is foregut fermentation.
Tapirs do it at the back. Like horses and rabbits — and like you — a tapir has the fermentation chamber after the small intestine: a large caecum (the pouch where the small and large intestine meet) and a long colon. The animal takes what it can with its own enzymes first; whatever it can't break down, which is most of a leaf, goes on to the microbes. That is hindgut fermentation. It is faster and less thorough than a cow's system, which is why hindgut fermenters eat so much and so often: a tapir browses through the night, and a good part of the day.
Here is what happens to a leaf on the way through:
- Mouth. The trunk pulls it in; the molars grind it. No cud, no second chewing — one pass.
- Stomach and small intestine. Acid and enzymes take the easy nutrients — sugars, protein, fat. Cellulose passes untouched.
- Caecum and colon: the vat. Trillions of bacteria ferment the fibre. Their waste products are what the tapir was after all along: short-chain fatty acids — mainly acetate, propionate and butyrate — absorbed straight through the gut wall and burned for energy.
- Out the other end. Seeds, mostly intact, planted somewhere new.
That word butyrate is worth a pause. The cells lining a mammal's colon — a tapir's or yours — run on it. It is their preferred fuel, and it signals to the immune system that all is well. A hindgut fermenter isn't just tolerating its bacteria; it is being fed by them.
Which brings us to you
You are a hindgut fermenter too. A modest one — your caecum is small, and the appendix hanging off it is famous mainly for being removed — but your colon does exactly what a tapir's does, on the fibre your own enzymes couldn't touch. The same bacteria, near enough; the same short-chain fatty acids; the same butyrate feeding the same kind of cells. The difference is scale. A tapir gets a living out of it. You get the signalling: the gut wall, the immune tone, and — through the vagus nerve and a set of metabolites we are only starting to map — a line to the brain.
That is where Trilliome comes in, though Tanya would tell you this herself if you tapped her. The species that do the most useful fermenting in a human gut are the ones that can't be put in a supplement: strict anaerobes that die on contact with air. So instead of adding bacteria, we make small plant-derived molecules that induce the ones already there. The mechanism is on the science page; the difference from probiotics and fibre is spelled out here.
| Tapir | Cow | You | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the microbes work | Caecum and colon (hindgut) | Rumen (foregut) | Colon (hindgut) |
| Chews it twice? | No | Yes — cud | No |
| What the microbes make | Short-chain fatty acids | Short-chain fatty acids | Short-chain fatty acids |
| Share of energy from fermentation | A lot | Most | A little |
| Nearest relative on this table | Horse | Sheep | Chimpanzee |
Five things to say at dinner
- A tapir's closest relatives are the horse and the rhino, not the pig.
- Baby tapirs look like watermelons on legs.
- A tapir can walk underwater and breathe through its trunk.
- Cows ferment first and digest second; tapirs and humans do it the other way round.
- The cells lining your colon run on a fatty acid made by bacteria — the same one that powers a tapir.
And the one on our front page?
She wanders the hero, she asks what brought you, and she keeps out of the way of the headline — that last part took more engineering than the rest of her put together. If you have a minute, tap her. She would like to know.