Are Chimps Cleaner Than Us?

A study investigating the microbes and bugs in chimpanzee beds versus human beds showed that chimps are cleaner than we are. Learn about the study's results in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Your parents probably spent years yelling
at you to clean your room and make your bed,
and sure, a neatly made bed looks tidy, but science
says that hardly matters. It seems no matter how tight
your bed corners are, how many quarters you can bounce

(00:22):
off that blanket, your bed still isn't as clean as
a chimpanzee's. Yep, Apparently chips are clean. We humans are
the pigs, which are also quite clean. But that's a
whole other episode. Researchers at North Carolina State University compared
human beds to the tree top nests that chimpanzees make
for themselves nightly. The scientists weren't looking for smooth sheets, though,

(00:44):
they were comparing microbes and insects and spiders. The lead
author on the paper, PhD student Megan thoe Ms, notes
that human beds usually contain some of the same microorganisms
that are found in the rest of the house. She
means germs, but she's being nice about it, she said
in a press statement. For example, about thirty five percent
of bacteria in human beds stem from our own bodies,

(01:07):
including fecal, oral, and skin bacteria, which actually, when you
put it that way, we're not share as technically nice.
Chimpanzees are closely related to humans in evolutionary terms, so
though I was in her team wanted to see if
the chimps beds were filled with similar bacteria and bugs
as humans beds. The answer turned out to be no.
The team swabbed forty one abandoned chimp beds located in

(01:30):
trees in Tanzania to look for microbes. They also vacuumed
fifteen of those nests to pick up any tiny critters
like parasitic insects and spiders. What they found was a
far more diverse group of microbes in the chimp nests,
which makes sense because the nests are outdoors and the
microbes reflect what you'd expect to find in the forest
where chimpanzees live. But researchers did not find nearly as

(01:53):
much fecal, oral, or skin bacteria as they did in
the human beds, only about three point five percent, which
was a surprise. The chimp nests also had no insects
or spiders, though the team expected to see some parasitic
species in the nests, but no, so Emma said. There
were only four ectoparasites found across all the nests we

(02:14):
looked at, and that's four individual specimens, not four different species. Granted,
chimps do build new nests every night, and they are
careful defecators, but fecal matter does build up in chimp
for so the researchers expected to find more of it
than they did, even in freshly built nests. So Emma said,
this work really highlights the role that man made structures

(02:37):
play in shaping the ecosystems of our immediate environment. In
some ways, our attempts to create a clean environment for
ourselves may actually make our surroundings less ideal. Today's episode
was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Klang.
If you enjoy our show and also wearing T shirts,

(02:59):
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check out our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.