Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Your parents probably spent years yelling
Speaker 1: at you to clean your room and make your bed,
Speaker 1: and sure, a neatly made bed looks tidy, but science
Speaker 1: says that hardly matters. It seems no matter how tight
Speaker 1: your bed corners are, how many quarters you can bounce
Speaker 1: off that blanket, your bed still isn't as clean as
Speaker 1: a chimpanzee's. Yep, Apparently chips are clean. We humans are
Speaker 1: the pigs, which are also quite clean. But that's a
Speaker 1: whole other episode. Researchers at North Carolina State University compared
Speaker 1: human beds to the tree top nests that chimpanzees make
Speaker 1: for themselves nightly. The scientists weren't looking for smooth sheets, though,
Speaker 1: they were comparing microbes and insects and spiders. The lead
Speaker 1: author on the paper, PhD student Megan thoe Ms, notes
Speaker 1: that human beds usually contain some of the same microorganisms
Speaker 1: that are found in the rest of the house. She
Speaker 1: means germs, but she's being nice about it, she said
Speaker 1: in a press statement. For example, about thirty five percent
Speaker 1: of bacteria in human beds stem from our own bodies,
Speaker 1: including fecal, oral, and skin bacteria, which actually, when you
Speaker 1: put it that way, we're not share as technically nice.
Speaker 1: Chimpanzees are closely related to humans in evolutionary terms, so
Speaker 1: though I was in her team wanted to see if
Speaker 1: the chimps beds were filled with similar bacteria and bugs
Speaker 1: as humans beds. The answer turned out to be no.
Speaker 1: The team swabbed forty one abandoned chimp beds located in
Speaker 1: trees in Tanzania to look for microbes. They also vacuumed
Speaker 1: fifteen of those nests to pick up any tiny critters
Speaker 1: like parasitic insects and spiders. What they found was a
Speaker 1: far more diverse group of microbes in the chimp nests,
Speaker 1: which makes sense because the nests are outdoors and the
Speaker 1: microbes reflect what you'd expect to find in the forest
Speaker 1: where chimpanzees live. But researchers did not find nearly as
Speaker 1: much fecal, oral, or skin bacteria as they did in
Speaker 1: the human beds, only about three point five percent, which
Speaker 1: was a surprise. The chimp nests also had no insects
Speaker 1: or spiders, though the team expected to see some parasitic
Speaker 1: species in the nests, but no, so Emma said. There
Speaker 1: were only four ectoparasites found across all the nests we
Speaker 1: looked at, and that's four individual specimens, not four different species. Granted,
Speaker 1: chimps do build new nests every night, and they are
Speaker 1: careful defecators, but fecal matter does build up in chimp
Speaker 1: for so the researchers expected to find more of it
Speaker 1: than they did, even in freshly built nests. So Emma said,
Speaker 1: this work really highlights the role that man made structures
Speaker 1: play in shaping the ecosystems of our immediate environment. In
Speaker 1: some ways, our attempts to create a clean environment for
Speaker 1: ourselves may actually make our surroundings less ideal. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Klang.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy our show and also wearing T shirts,
Speaker 1: check out our online shop at t public dot com
Speaker 1: slash brain Stuff. We've also got a bunch of back
Speaker 1: to school stuff like laptop cases there too, and of course,
Speaker 1: for lots more on this and other squeaky clean topics,
Speaker 1: check out our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.