But most of those species were rare: 2,128 of them were present in the navels of fewer than six people. To put that into context, that's more than twice the biodiversity of North American birds or ants. In the 60 samples they first assessed, they counted at least 2,368 species and suspect that figure is likely an underestimate. So they set out to find out what bacteria live inside of our navels.īeginning with that initial study (there has since been a second round of sampling), Dunn and his team have discovered tremendous microbiological diversity hiding in belly buttons, a veritable treasure trove of microscopic lifeforms. "The belly button is one of the habitats closest to us, and yet it remains relatively unexplored," they wrote. Instead, they wanted to understand the belly button microbiome. But the researchers weren't all that interested in the lint. In 2011, Dunn and his colleagues collected samples from more than 500 volunteers at the 2011 Science Online conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, and at the Darwin Day event at Raleigh's Museum of Natural Sciences. Rob Dunn, a researcher in the Department of Biology and the Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at NCSU, established a citizen science project called the "Belly Button Diversity Project". While only a scant few researchers have committed their time and energy to exploring the ontogeny of navel fluff – perhaps Kruszelnicki and Steinhauser are the only ones – there is a serious research effort underway at North Carolina State University to understand what else lives in our belly buttons.
Based on this, he reasoned that those whose navels accumulate fluff might have generally cleaner and more hygienic belly buttons, because the removal of lint takes everything else along for the ride. Stomach hairs, it seems, do not discriminate. Based on the chemical readout, Steinhauser suspects that the remaining matter is made of house dust, flakes of skin, fat, proteins, and sweat. What he found, however, was that other debris became folded into navel lint as well. If his navel fluff were made solely of fibres from his t-shirt, then the analysis would reveal that the lint was made entirely of cellulose. He analysed the chemical composition of a BBL sample that he collected after wearing a plain white 100% cotton t-shirt. On average, a single piece had a mass of 1.82 milligrams, though seven pieces were more than 7.2 milligrams, and the winner was a true belly button behemoth, weighing a whopping 9.17 milligrams.īut Steinhauser took his research one step further. Their combined weight didn't even reach a single gram. In all Steinhauser collected 503 samples from his own belly button. Though he insists that he maintains good personal hygiene, including a shower each morning, his navel invariably becomes filled with fluff by the day's end.
For reasons known only to himself, Steinhauser collected his own navel fluff each evening for three years. In 2009, a Vienna University of Technology researcher named Georg Steinhauser published his hypothesis in the eyebrow-raising journal Medical Hypotheses. Kruszelnicki wasn't the only person to take a stab at what forms the fluff that fills belly buttons around the world. Hairs around the belly button, they think, operate as a "one-way ratchet mechanism", stealing tiny fibres from inside your clothes and depositing them into your navel. While perhaps not the world's leading experts on the topic, Dr Karl and his colleagues arrived at an explanation for the formation of navel fluff that, at least, makes intuitive sense. It turned out that shaving belly hair indeed prevented the accumulation of lint. In addition to the online survey, Kruszelnicki and his colleagues collected samples from willing volunteers and also asked some to shave the hair from around their belly buttons.
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