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SALT LAKE CITY — There's a lot more than just lint trapped in your navel, including things that have never been studied.
A team of creative biologists at North Carolina State University have discovered an amazing number of species living inside everyday navels — including 662 kinds of bacteria that have not been classified into any specifiable family, suggesting they have never been seen by science before.
The project is called Belly Button Biodiversity, and it's mission is to get people excited and aware of microbiology and all the implications it has for the human body. As they state on their website, you might know more about a kangaroo than you do about the things growing on you all the time.
Science writer Carl Zimmerwas asked by the young scientists performing the study to offer up a sample of his own umbilical vestige. The results turned up one species that has only ever been seen in the ocean, and another only found in Japanese soil.
Mr. Zimmer, mind you, has never been to Japan.
Jeri Hulcr, team leader, began simply wanting to educate people about the importance of microbiology, and to show that not every bacterium is harmful by nature. But the more the looked, the more new species they found, and the more interesting the results became.
"You, and me and everybody else — we have more bacterial cells in our body than human cells. And so we are really, essentially, walking human covers for microbial biota," he said in an interview with Living on Earth.
Disruption in this balance of trillions of cells is often what leads to harmful diseases. Having a lot isn't necessarily bad if they are all keeping one species from predominating.
"Only if something goes wrong, only if one member predominates, or if we scrub ourselves too much — for example, if we do something that's akin to clear-cutting in the forest — then you get all the weeds growing really fast," he said
Now it's becoming clear exactly how diverse the forest on our bodies really is.
Email: dnewlin@ksl.com
