Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/19/human-beds-have-much-more-sali.html
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Hey! I wash my sheets at least once a year!
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Well yeah. Chimps are probably less creative when it comes to getting busy.
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Well I’ve never seen a chimp with a Serta memory foam mattress but hey, I don’t hang out in trees much.
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Sure, their beds are cleaner but are they cleaner themselves?
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…and you should be TERRIFIED because BACTERIA! People who don’t buy hand sanitizer will DIE!!!
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Heck, I’ve found myself drooling on the pillow even with my lips closed. And, no, I don’t know quite how I do that.
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is it though? is it unsavory? It’s your biome. I mean, sure, keep the E. Coli down to manageable level, but having a single stat about “saliva, skin and fecal bacteria” as a set is like having a stat about nurses, teachers and nazis.
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Chimps be missin’ out!
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From the “misreading the article” department, TFA states that only a small fraction of the species in chimp beds come from the chimps, roughly a tenth the proportion of ours.
Well, hooda thunk? Chimps sleep where other mammals, birds, insects, whatever have been excreting since the last fire or torrential rain. There’s a full microecology there, down to the decay bacteria and fungi and perhaps even mushrooms and ant-zombi fungus.
Not nearly so much of that in our homes, so of course our bed biome is less varied, with our own commensal flora playing a large role along with flora from the digestive track of dust mites, spiders, flies, mosquitoes, moths, etc.
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To be fair, dust mites contribute to the fecal matter.
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Curiously selective criteria. There are likely plenty of other things in the average “chimp bed” that would be undesirable to most humans. I also don’t appreciate being lumped in with all humans—the especially filthy among us tend to skew the average. Given the high level of variability in human living conditions and behavior, generalizations about “all humans” often don’t tell you much about any one human.
At the end of the day, I don’t particularly care about any bed that I’m not sleeping in. Sorry, authors in the study, I don’t intend to take a dirt nap anytime soon. You can sleep with the chimps.
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Indeed.
I’ll bet they’d find many, Many more of those bacteria on the actual humans sleeping in those beds.
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I read the headline and thought “Wow, that’s fascinating! I wonder why? I mean, I’m sure they’ve corrected for the obvious fact that humans always sleep in the same bed while chimps move around, so what could it be?”
Haha, nope.
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My bedstuffs are enhanced by the presence of a house cat so my bedpoop is minimized by the addition of plenty of hair and dander and cat butt flakes and the occasional dead mouse and the occasional alive mouse.
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don’t monkeys do you the ‘you have a tick but oh we don’t talk’
when they not getting horney they clean each others coats…
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I’ve been using the same pillow for around 30 years. Imagine how much terrible crap is in there. Once every two years or so I’ll stick it though the washing machine, dry it in the hot sun, and then freeze it in in the chest freezer. But still, there will be a lot of bacteria bodies in there. And now that I’m 38 weeks pregnant I’m drooling all over it every night. My husband recently moved to a different bedroom, but that was because of the terrible snoring.
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Those damned apes are not nearly as dirty as we like to think they are. Or rather, we hominids are not really any cleaner than they.
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You have obviously never heard of bonobos
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huh, obviously I am the next step in evolution!
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