BrainStuff Classics: 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 classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/bed-has-more-poop-than-chimps.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel bomb here with a classic
brain Stuff episode. In this one, we delve into a
study that aimed to discover whether all of humans ingenuity
really makes us any cleaner than other animals, like, for example, chimpanzees.

(00:24):
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 off that blanket, your bed still isn't as
clean as a chimpanzee's. Yep, Apparently chips are clean. We

(00:48):
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, they were comparing microbes and insects and spiders.
The lead author on the paper, PhD student Megan Thoemus,

(01:10):
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 of
bacteria in human beds stem from our own bodies, including fecal, oral,
and skin bacteria, which actually, when you put it that way,
we're not sure as technically nice. Chimpanzees are closely related

(01:34):
to humans in evolutionary terms, so though i us 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 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.

(01:58):
What they found was a far more verse 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 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

(02:20):
nests also had no insects or spiders, though the team
expected to see some parasitic species in the nests, but no.
Tho Emma said there were only four ectoparasites found across
all the nests we 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

(02:45):
does build up in chimp for so the researchers expected
to find more of it than they did, even in
freshly built nests. The Emma said, this work really highlights
the role that man made structures 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 is based on the

(03:14):
article your bed has more poop than the Chimps on
how stuff works dot com, written by Kristen hall Geisler.
Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership
with how Stuff Works dot com and it's produced by
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