Nature may be wild, but that doesn’t mean anything goes anywhere, and many animals follow strict rules for separating metabolic ingress and egress, and avoiding sources of contamination. Want examples? Take the Northern Flicker. According to a new report in the journal Animal Behaviour on the sanitation habits of these tawny, 12-inch woodpeckers with downcurving bills, male flickers are more industrious housekeepers than their mates.

Researchers already knew that flickers, like many woodpeckers, are a so-called sex role reversed species, the fathers spending comparatively more time incubating the eggs and feeding the young than do the mothers. Now scientists have found that the males’ parental zeal also extends to the less sentimental realm of nest hygiene: When a chick makes waste, Dad, more readily than Mom, is the one who makes haste, plucking up the unwanted presentation and disposing of it far from home.

Then there are the undertaker bees. that specialize in removing corpses from the hive. Not to forget the chimpanzee brigade which oh-so-lovingly remove ticks off each other. Cleanliness habits vary among troops across the world – some squash the pesky pests while others choose between eating or discarding them.

The undertaker bees tirelessly patrol the honeycomb corridors, lift up any newly deceased bees they encounter, totter off with a payload fourfold heavier than the average pack of pollen, and then dump the bodies some 20 feet from the hive, anywhere from 25 to 100 times a day.

Read the entire New York Times report here.