This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen, and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its ‘women on top’ plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes’ plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole.

Conservation plans may conflict when both predator and prey in the same ecological system are threatened species. In this study we present a problematic case of conflicting conservation policies involving the Arabian wolf Canis lupus arabs and two species of gazelles (Gazella gazella acaciae and Gazella dorcas), all of which are threatened in Israel. By studying genetic subdivision using faecal DNA we evaluated the policy of treating the Arabian wolves in the Negev Desert as two separate populations. We analysed 95 wolf faecal samples from 12 feeding sites c. 20 km apart. Network analysis and Bayesian clustering were used for separating populations. Mark–recapture design, rarefaction and an urn model were applied to estimate wolf population size. We found that wolves in the central and southern Negev cannot be genetically separated, and their density is similar in both regions. Our results provide a better baseline for a unified management of wolves in the Negev. We call for the consideration of other factors influencing gazelle population size before adopting drastic measures such as wolf removal.