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Welcome to the Jungle- your belly button
Thursday 22nd November 2012 | Olga
The dark truth about your belly button- a new worry to add to your list.
You're on a night out, you’ve managed to woo the only hot guy in the club and you're feeling confident. Your thoughts then jump ahead of time to the bedroom and you're wondering whether you’ve got a condom lying around somewhere, right?? Well before you can worry about sexually transmitted diseases, here’s a new worry to add to your list- the rain forest growing on his belly button that your rubbing up against right now in a dagger move. Yes, a rain forest. Welcome to the jungle.
Rob Dunn and his team of ecologists aren’t your average navel explorers. They’re professional navel explorers, thank you very much, and their new study has revealed some shocking information about what’s going on in our navels. From 60 belly buttons, the team found 2,368 bacterial species, 1,458 of which may be new to science. Ninety two per cent of the bacteria types showed up on fewer than 10 per cent of the subjects…in fact, most of the time they appeared in only a single subject. Shocking. So shocking that one of the subjects harbored a bacterium that had previously only been found in Japanese soil- and here’s the catch- he’s never been there himself. Eight species were consistent in more than 70 per cent of the subjects, which is the final touch that makes the belly button a lot like a rain forest. What a poetic thought that is.
So next time you're at a sticky summer festival, wasted on cider that’s way too cheap to be true, and think it’s a good idea to start stripping, think about all those other rainforests around you.
- by Olga Formalnova
