Smelly Belly Button?
P.U. Does your belly button smell like cheese? You might have a rare disease called stinkalobelia. Just kidding. Belly buttons collect dead skin cells, sweat, and clothing lint. You probably just forgot to wash it out the last time you took a bath.
Peanut Butter and Toe Jam
Toe jam is like belly-button lint between your toes. Toe cheese is a green fungus that grows between the toes from not changing your socks for days . . . and days.
Gross meter: 10
Many frogs, salamanders, and lizards, especially geckos, shed their skin and eat it! It’s full of calcium. Yum!
Gross meter: 5
A snake rubs against something rough to tear a hole in its old skin. As it crawls out, its skin turns inside out, as if the snake were taking off a sock. Birds use the old skin to line their nests.
Gross meter: 8
A land hermit crab will bury itself for weeks while it molts and eats its old shell.
Gross meter: 4
As a bedbug grows, it will shed its skin five times.
Gross meter: 7
In traditional Chinese medicine, dried casings of cicadas are used to cure poison ivy and other itchy rashes.
Here’s the poop on animals. They sure do eat some crazy-weird stuff!
Dung Diners
* Puffins eat whale dung.
* Ivory gulls eat polar-bear poop.
* Dogs love to eat cat poop because it’s high in protein.
* Rabbits, rodents, and gorillas, as well as many insects and other plant eaters will eat their own poop! Because what they eat is hard to digest, they have to eat it twice! Poop has lots of vitamins.
Do I Look Fat in This?
* Every night, vampire bats drink half their body weight in blood.
* Guess what happened when a Burmese python (a whopping 13-footer) swallowed an alligator whole? Ka-boom! It exploded. Snake guts + gator guts = eeuw stew!
* Caterpillars eat 27,000 times their body weight.
Oh, Baby!
The spadefoot toad eats its own tadpoles.
Mr. Sandman
There are moths in Asia that eat the eye gunk of cattle, buffalo, and elephants.
Watch Your Step!
The plover picks out bits of food to eat from between the teeth of a crocodile!
Rat Snacks
Rats will eat just about anything — paint, leather, even an elephant’s toenail!
Beauty and the Feet
Butterflies will sip at sweaty sneakers to get salt.
Get your bib on for some of the strangest things ever eaten!
Click here for the answers.
Stop That Thief!
Simon Hooper saw the ring he wanted to give his girlfriend, but it cost too much. So he ate it! Dorchester, England, police caught him by running a metal detector over his tummy. He went to jail for three days until he pooped out the ring!
The Big Cheese
Q: What’s big and yellow, weighs 1,400 pounds, and made a big stink at the White House in 1837?
A: Cheese! President Andrew Jackson’s favorite food. In 1835, a cheesemaker sent a giant 1,400-pound wheel of cheddar to the White House. For two years, Jackson ate the cheese and gave it to friends. On leaving office two years later, he still hadn’t finished the cheese. So he held a big party and brought out the seriously smelly old cheese. It was so stinky that some people fainted. Ten thousand people came to the party and ate it in two hours! After the party, the carpet was slippery with cheese glop. Cheese skating, anyone?
In the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and some other countries, there are people who eat roadkill. No lie.
From deer, moose, bear, and elk that are hit by cars, to armadillos, raccoons, skunks, and birds, they’ll throw them in the pot! There’s even a cookbook with recipes for cooking roadkill. Moose meatballs, anyone?
Upchuck. Puke. Hurl. Barf. Toss a sidewalk pizza. No matter what you call it, it’s not pretty. It’s vomit-ocious!
Spilling Your Guts
Did you know that frogs throw up? They puke their guts out. No lie. It was discovered on a space mission that a frog throws up its stomach first. The frog digs out all of the stomach’s contents, then swallows the stomach back down again!
Lick . . . Lick . . . Gulp
Does your cat have a trichobezoar? Relax — it’s just a slimy hair ball. Cats swallow hair from grooming themselves, then spit it back up.
Dinosaur Puke?
The 160-million-year-old fossilized vomit of an ichthyosaur was discovered in 2002 in Peterborough, England.
Puke Overboard!
Ambergris is a fancy name for whale vomit. When whales can’t digest everything they eat, they throw up a 100-pound slimeball that smells like poop. Oddly enough, its main use is in perfumes.
No Puking at the Table, Please!
In Roman times, people ate so much that is was common to puke after dinner. Get thee to the vomitorium, a special room just for puking.
Snap, crackle, pop! All over the world, people eat insects for protein, from grubs and grasshoppers to tarantulas and termites. Check out this creepy-crawly menu. Mmm-mmm, good.
Appetizers
* Grilled black witch moths
* Leaf-footed bug salsa with roasted mealworms
* Deep-fried crickets
Soup & Salad
* Wasp salad
* Soup with boll-weevil croutons
Main Dishes
* Mealworm spaghetti
* Stinkbug pizza
* Chop suey ants
* Dragonfly kebab
* Grasshopper enchiladas
Desserts
* Honeypot ants
* Chocolate-covered locusts
* Chocolate-chip mealworm cookies
* Cricket fruitcake
Don’t forget to drink your milk. Roach milk, that is.
If you get the bug to eat a bug, try finding a bug or bug-eating festival near you:
The Bug Bowl
Purdue University West Lafayette, IN Complete with a cricket-spitting contest!
Bug Chef Cook-Off
Broad Appétit Food Festival Richmond, VA White-chocolate waxworm cookies, anyone?
Bug Day
Randall Museum San Francisco, CA Author Megan McDonald ate a roasted cricket and a toasted mealworm here. No lie!
Bugfest
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Washington, D.C. Don’t miss the hissing-cockroach races!
The Insectarium
Philadelphia, PA Try a tasty mealworm at the museum’s traveling show.
Meet some creepy crawlies of the six-legged variety. These guys are sure to make your skin crawl!
Wigged Out!
It was once thought that earwigs could crawl in your ear and tunnel into your brain while you’re sleeping. That’s how they got their name, but it’s not true. Earwig fossils date back to the Late Triassic period.
Dung Beetles
Dung beetles feed on poop!
There are three kinds of dung beetles:
* Rollers roll the poop into a big ball and take it home to eat later.
* Tunnelers bury the dung for safekeeping.
* Dwellers set up house in the dung and slowly munch on their home.
* Dung beetles live on every continent except Antarctica.
* When dung beetles are rolling dung into a ball, they will follow a straight line no matter what obstacles are in their path. And they have to roll fast, or another beetle might steal their dinner!
* Dried dung beetles are used in traditional Chinese medicine to cure ten different diseases.
Cockroaches
Ken Edwards ate thirty-six cockroaches in one minute on the set of The Big Breakfast in London on March 5, 2001.
* What has no wings but can scale smooth glass? What has horns and makes a hissing sound when it fights? Move over, Superman. It’s the Hisser! The Madagascar hissing cockroach, that is.
Click here for the answers.
Fo
od Most Foul
Guess what’s coming to dinner? Bugs and rodent hairs! You heard it right. The FDA inspects food to make it safe. But did you know certain creepy-crawlies wiggle their way in? The FDA says it’s okay to have a small amount of rodent hairs, droppings, and insect parts in our food.
* Canned tomatoes: 10 fly eggs per 2 cups
* Macaroni: 225 insect parts per cup
* Mushrooms: 20 maggots per half cup
* Peanut butter: 1 rat hair and 30 insect parts per half cup
* Popcorn: 2 rodent hairs or 1 rodent turd per pound
* Potato chips: 6 percent of potatoes are allowed to be rotten
* Spices: 325 insect parts per 5 teaspoons
* Wheat flour: 75 insect pieces per quarter cup
Heave-ho! Americans toss out a whopping 250 million tons of trash each year. That means every person in the U.S. throws away almost 4½ pounds of garbage per day.
The Pits
It once was a copper mine known as the Richest Hill in the World. Today, just outside Butte, Montana, lies the Pit of Life and Death — a toxic pit of green poison a mile and a half wide and a third of a mile deep. No plants grow there, no insects buzz there, and no fish swim there. The only thing that can survive there is a slime called Euglena mutabilis.
What a Dump!
Out in the middle of the ocean is a swirling, whirling island of garbage called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Plastic bags and bottles, tires, lawn chairs, flip-flops, hockey gloves, computer monitors, and even rubber duckies are just a few of the items that make up a garbage cesspool the size of Texas.
Zombie-fied
There are 405 dead zones in the world’s oceans. Nothing can live in these areas because the deep water there doesn’t have enough oxygen due to man-made chemicals. The largest dead zone near the U.S. is the size of New Jersey and stretches off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s Ducky!
In 1992, 28,000 rubber ducks (as well as plastic frogs, beavers, and turtles) washed overboard from a cargo ship in the Pacific. Twenty years later, some are still found floating as far away as Hawaii to Iceland to Australia.
Where Have All the Trash Trucks Gone?
Garbage collectors stopped picking up trash in Naples, Italy, in December 2007 and didn’t get back to work until the middle of January 2008. By then, the city was overflowing with a month’s worth of garbage. P. Ueey!
Trash to Treasure
Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach is a mountain 60 feet high and 800 feet long that was created from garbage. Layers of garbage and soil were compacted to build what is now a popular park.
Mushy History Mystery
When museum officials in Pittsburgh dug up a time capsule after a hundred years . . . it stank! Toy soldiers, a tattered flag, Confederate money, and old newspapers and photographs had rotted into one giant mess of mush that looked like a “mummified alien.” So they froze it, then put the whole mess in a glass case at the museum!
Put your poop, pee, and other yuckables to good use! Here are a few ways to turn gross stuff into good stuff:
I Can Pee Clearly Now
In colonial times in America, rags dipped in pee were used to clean windows.
Romans used crushed mouse brains for toothpaste, and they gargled with pee.
The Buzz
Stinky socks are helping to fight malaria, a deadly disease spread by the bite of infected mosquitos. How? Scientists have learned that mosquitoes like stinky-sock smell even more than the smell of blood, so they’ve begun to trap malaria-carrying mosquitoes using old smelly socks as bait.
Bacteria Busters!
Doctors in the U.K. use maggots to speed up healing a wound, ulcer, or burn. The maggots picnic on pus that can make the wound infected.
Pee You!
Three, Two, One, blast off! You’re in outer space, and you’re thirsty. Whadda ya do? Have a glass of pee. A water purifier at the International Space Station turns sweat and pee into drinking water. Thirsty, anyone?
Fish Eat Dandruff?
In Japan, instead of a spa treatment, you can dip into a pool of hungry carp. Nibble, nibble. The fish will eat away your dry, scaly, flaky skin.
Move Over, Green — Go Brown!
Would you live in a house made of poop?
In Indonesia, there’s a lot of cow dung. But it’s being made into bricks that are lighter and stronger than clay bricks.
This Bus Runs on Poop!
From potty to power, a year’s worth of your poop can be turned into 2.1 gallons of usable diesel fuel.
Lifesaver
The Incas are famous for building Machu Picchu, a city high up in the Andes Mountains. But they could not have done it without poop. What? That’s right. Llama dung fertilized the soil so that corn could grow at super-high altitudes.
Save a Tree!
Use paper made of elephant poop. No lie. Elephants are vegetarians, so their poop has a lot of fiber — the same stuff used to make paper. It’s fragrance free, too!
* Elephants eat 250 kilograms of food per day.
* An elephant poops about 50 kilograms of dung a day.
* From that, 115 sheets of paper can be made.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Is your mom pooped out? Tweet your mother to a very special facial — with a Japanese face cream that contains bird poop. Yes, nightingale poop facials are all the rage in Japan for smooth skin.
Unhappy Meal?
Scientist Mitsuyuki Ikeda has taken protein from human poop and made it into meat. Nickname: the poop burger. Got ketchup?
Potty Potty
Virginia Gardiner has come up with a waterless, flushless, odorless toilet made out of . . . horse manure.
A Car that Smells like French Fries?
Leftover French fry oil can be converted to power a car. Prince Charles of England has a train that runs completely off of the stuff. How about some fish to go with those chips?
Feel a booger coming on? April 23 is International Nose Picking Day. (And while you’re at it, September 8 is Nose Hair Maintenance Day.)
Enter your smelly sneakers in the National Odor-Eaters Rotten Sneaker Contest in Montpelier, Vermont. If your sneakers outstink all the others, you win $2,500 and a spot in the “Hall of Fumes”!
Head to Talkeetna, Alaska, for the Annual Moose Dropping Festival. Moose turds are dropped from a helicopter, and festivalgoers bet on whether they will hit a target. A pancake breakfast, parade, and moose-poop toss are all part of the two-day fun.
Hail to the toilet! January 27 is Thomas Crapper Day, a day to honor the guy who invented the flush toilet.
Liven up the sleepover! Freak out your favorite friend or sister.
Click here for the answers.
The Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Uncle John’s Creature Feature Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Ashland, OR: Portable Press, 2010.
Borgenicht, David, Nathaniel Marunas, and Robin Epstein. Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Gross Junior Edition. Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks. Illustrated by Chuck Gonzales. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2010.
Branzei, Sylvia. Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things. Illustrated by Jack Keely. New York: Price Stern Sloan, 2002.
Connolly, Sean. The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science: 64 Daring Experiments for Young Scientists. New York: Workman, 2008.
Dobson, Mary. Reeking Royals. Smelly Old History series. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Glenday, Craig, ed. Guinness World Records 2011. New York: Bantam, 2011.
Hargrave, Sir John. Sir John Hargrave’s Mischief Maker’s Manual. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 2009.
MacDonald, Guy. Even More Children’s Miscellany: Smart, Silly, and Strange Information That’s Essential to Know. Illustrated by Niki Catlow. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2008.
Masoff, Joy. Oh, Yikes! History’s Grossest, Wackiest Moments. Illustrated by Terry Sirrell. New York: Workman, 2006.
———. Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything
Nasty. Illustrated by Terry Sirrell. New York: Workman, 2000.
National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. The Exquisite Corpse Adventure. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2011.
Ramos-Elorduy, Julieta. Creepy Crawly Cuisine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects. Photographs by Peter Menzel. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1998.
Szpirglas, Jeff. They Did What?!: Your Guide to Weird and Wacky Things People Do. Illustrated by Dave Whamond. Toronto: Maple Tree Press, 2005.
Every Breath You Take
1c, 2b, 3c, 4befj, 5h
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Which Slimeball Said What?
1f, 2g, 3d, 4b, 5c, 6e, 7a
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Today’s Specials!
All true.
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