by Bart King
Fun(gus) Facts!
The ancient Romans had a lot of gods, and one of them was Robigus, Lord of Fungus! Robigus was also the easygoing god of farms and fertility. But after a cruel Roman kid set a fox’s tail on fire, Robigus decided to give wheat crops a horrible fungus called “wheat rust.” This fungus ruined the wheat for humans, and foxes rejoiced.
You and I actually have a lot in common with the fungus world. We are all opisthokonts. That means we can’t make food with our bodies like a plant can. Instead, we have to eat something else . . . like wheat!
While we humans eat food by sticking it inside our bodies and digesting it, fungi do the opposite. They grab onto a food and release enzymes on it to break it down. Then the fungi absorb the food through their membranes. That’s right, fungi absorb. Weird, huh?
Fungi are nature’s decomposers. They eat some living things and almost all dead ones. Heck, they even feed on stuff that never lived at all! Fungi chow down on things like bread, wood, bananas, cloth, leather, sponges, dead humans, and even plastic and paint. They’re unstoppable! Cold temperatures don’t really bother most fungi, so if you leave cottage cheese in the refrigerator or in the freezer, even these food items will eventually get moldy! (Mold is just another fungus.)
Instead of using seeds to reproduce, fungi use spores. These tiny reproductive cells are floating all around us. And if a fungal spore lands on something that might possibly be “food,” then fungus will grow there. In fact, your body is constantly fighting the little fungus spores trying to grow in your lungs. Luckily, your immune system does this pretty easily. But patients going through chemotherapy have weaker immune systems than most healthy people. This can create an opening for a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus. Once this fungus infects the lungs, it kills almost 90 percent of its victims!
A less deadly but still disgusting fungus is the little stinkhorn. This is a fungus that eats rotting wood. Once a stinkhorn spore lands on a likely spot, it will grow a stalk several inches tall with an oozing ball at the top. This ball smells like rotting meat! This attracts insects, which land on the ball, where they become coated in the stinkhorn’s gooey spores. Then the bugs fly off.
And that’s how the little stinkhorn gets around!
An even more fascinating travel tale comes to us from truffles. A truffle is a fungus that grows underneath rich woodland soil. Besides being covered in dirt, truffles are pretty ugly; they look sort of like fungus meteorites with a thick bumpy skin. Some humans claim to like the truffle’s taste, and they’re willing to pay top dollar for them. Italian white truffles are going for $4,000 a pound right now!
What’s odd about this is that a truffle is mostly made up of fungal spores, and animals (humans included) can’t digest fungal spores! So a person eats a truffle and poops the truffle’s spores out. This is sort of a waste, since most humans flush their poop instead of going out and taking a dump on the woodland floor. If more truffle-eaters would poop in the woods, there would be more truffles. (And then everyone could afford them!)
Stomach-Churning Worms
My curiosity about worms began at an early age. I was often told that “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.” But what goopy mischief are they doing between entering and exiting?
In the case of the giant sea worm, they’re making a lot of mischief. Recently, the workers at a big British aquarium were really confused. One of their colossal tanks had a vandal, but they couldn’t figure out who (or what) was injuring its fish and destroying its coral. So at night, workers would lay bait traps set with fish hooks. But in the morning, the traps would be gone, fish hooks and all!
Eventually, the staff spotted a four-foot-long sea worm. It was a truly frightening worm, bristling with spikes and a mouth that would make you shudder. Marine biologists warned that if anyone were stung by the beast, it would cause permanent numbness. Man, that was one scary worm! To catch it, they fed the creature bait attached to a fishing line. The worm promptly ate the bait . . . and bit through the line! No one knew what the beast was doing there, but they guessed that a sea worm larva or egg may have snuck into the aquarium when another marine animal was introduced.
To get the horrible-looking, spiny beast out, they drained the aquarium and did the only thing they could do: they put the worm in his own aquarium. Then they named it “Barry”!
It turns out that the ocean has a number of disgusting creatures, and one of the worst is the sacculina. It’s sort of a combination of a vampire, a zombie scientist...and a barnacle.
Let me explain!
A baby sacculina is a tiny creature related to the barnacle. It floats happily along in the water until it sees a nice crab to infect. Once a crab is located, the sacculina drills itself right into the crab’s body, where it starts eating its flesh and getting bigger. Tendrils grow out of the sacculina and into the crab’s body. Pretty soon, the parasite’s tendrils reach from stem to stern. The poor crab is now the sacculina’s zombie, existing only to eat and provide a home for the creature as it mates, has baby sacculinas, and then takes over other crabs.
So if you ever open crack a crab and find a parasite’s tentacles inside it, now you know what you’re up against!
While these examples are revolting, probably the most unpleasant place to find a parasitic worm (or “gut nematode”) is inside you. Take the tapeworm, for example. Any animal that eats meat might also eat the eggs or larvae of one of the species of tapeworm. But don’t worry, you probably won’t get one of these worms unless you ever happen to eat pork, fish, or beef.
Once a tapeworm is inside your system, it finds a spot deep within your small intestine to set up shop. Then the tapeworm anchors itself. How? Well, it has a big sucker on its head, and it has hooks too. (Yeah, I guess you were better off not knowing.)
The tapeworm feeds on the food passing by, and it starts to grow. The key to understanding how big a tapeworm gets is to think about how your intestines wind around and around inside your body, sort of like a coiled rope. As the tapeworm gets longer, it also coils around inside you. It can grow up to thirty feet long!
As the tapeworm gets bigger, it grows segments that are full of thousands of eggs. These segments look like flat pieces of tape, and they eventually break off and exit your body along with your poop. The idea is that the eggs will find a new home inside another lucky host somewhere else.
If the tapeworm is too big to think about, try the fluke on for size. These little flatworms are so small that they can sneak into your body right through your skin. Next stop? Your liver, where the flukes will lay millions of eggs and start swimming all through your bloodstream!
Pinworms are also very gross. These tiny little creatures live inside people’s butts. (Kids usually get pinworms, because pinworm larvae are found in the dirt, and kids both play in dirt and do a crummy job washing their hands.) At night, the pinworms come out of their, uh, home and lay their eggs in butt cheek land. How does a person know he or she has pinworms? Can you say “itchy”?
Roundworms look the most like earthworms of any of our parasites. These worms are supposed to hang out in the intestines, but they are sort of like nomads, traveling throughout the body. They have been known to suddenly show up in a person’s nose, mouth, or anus.
And that is very uncool.
But of all the disgusting worms I know of, I think the worst is the hookworm. Hookworms are about a half-inch long, and they like nothing better than hanging out in poop and dirt and then burrowing into the soles of people who are walking around barefoot. From there, it’s on to the intestines, where the hookworms latch on and start gorging on blood and reproducing. What do the baby hookworms do? Latch on, gorge on blood, and reproduce! And since hookworms may be in as many as one in four people worldwide, they’re doing a pretty good job of it. But a good job for a hookworm is a bad thing for a human. In extreme cases of hookworm infection, the victim loses so much blood he turns pale, becomes weak and tired, and can start suffering heart problems. The vict
im’s hair may even change color!
Some people think earthworms are gross, but that’s silly. They’re harmless! However, a relative of the earthworm is definitely bad news. Yep, I’m talking about the leech. While earthworms don’t bite, a leech can bite you twice at the same time! That’s because many leeches have two mouths. Leeches find this handy, since a lot of them want to suck your blood. But leech bites are painless. After cutting through your skin with its sharp teeth, the leech quickly spits into the bite. And since leech spit kills pain, you probably won’t notice the bite at all.
In addition to having two mouths, the leech also has two suckers, one at each end. One sucker has the two mouths at the center, and the other sucker has the leech’s anus in the middle. So that’s what you call a “lose-lose” sucker situation.
There are hundreds of kinds of leeches, and luckily, some of them prefer eating garbage. Some leeches even attach themselves to dead animals, so they are NOT choosy! They range in size from tiny to over two feet long. Leeches may clamp onto your legs, but they also like to swim to a dark crevice where you won’t find them, like your armpit, your butt, or worse! No, I did not make that up. These types of leeches are usually found in Africa, Asia, and islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
If you’re in blood-sucking leech country and you find a leech on you, don’t cut it off. You could cut that leech right in half and it would keep sucking! In the movies, adventurers often put the lit end of a cigarette on the leech to make it let go. But since you don’t smoke, this won’t work. (Dang, the one thing smoking is good for!) Instead, put salt or lemon juice on the leech. Then it will let go. (Ice cubes also work, but since you’d probably be out in a tropical rain forest if you got a leech, I’m guessing you won’t have an ice cube on you!)
The worst leech story I’ve heard is this one: An Australian woman was out gardening when she accidentally got some soil in her eye . . . and a small leech was in there too. The leech started feasting on the blood from her eyeball! Even though she got medical attention, the leech quickly tripled in size. Nasty!
So how did the doctors get rid of this eyeball-sucking monster? By giving her some eye drops of saline solution! As one doctor reported, “The leech rolled straight off, it just fell onto her cheek, so we put it in a pot and gave it to her.”
Gee, thanks, Doc!
Chiggers are (Not) Wonderful Things
Chiggers are little mites that dig into the skin of animals, especially during the summer. The little buggers inject a fluid into the skin that liquefies a tiny portion of it. Then the chigger eats this dissolved skin. Little jerk! This inflames the surrounding skin and leaves a red welt that itches like crazy. Since the chigger is red too, this makes the tiny demon hard to spot and explains why almost everyone hates chiggers.
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[7] All of this is true except the knife part.
Breaking the Wind
Hot air rises. That makes having gas—or “flatulence”—one of this book’s lighter topics! And since both the ancient Greeks and Romans thought that “breaking the wind” was amusing, it also has a time-honored place in entertainment.
Today, flatulence still has the power to make some people laugh, and Trevor Cox is one of them. Cox is a professor of acoustics who is doing research on the sound of flatulence. As part of his research, he conducted a series of experiments to find out what kind of farting sounds would be rated as the funniest by listeners.
Cox’s theory is that people will laugh the most at an unexpectedly odd farting sound. This proved true for me; I took part in the experiment, and I thought the “Phfwwoothf” fart was a riot. (Who’d ever heard of such a thing!)
Unlike burping, there are no places where it’s polite to pass gas. In fact, it can get you into trouble! An eighth grader in Lakeland, Florida, was suspended from riding the bus for passing too much gas. And a British soccer referee once gave a yellow penalty card to a whole soccer team because one of its players farted loudly during its opponent’s penalty kick. The charge was “ungentlemanly conduct.” (Hard to argue with that!)
The smeller’s the Feller
A Scottish man named Stewart Laidlaw was banned from his local pub for “basking in the glory of his smells.” Of course, Laidlaw made the mistake of taking credit for the smells he was basking in!
People obviously have very strong feelings about flatulence. In the 1880s, British explorer Richard Burton explained how in the Middle East, people burped to show that they were enjoying their food. But he added that the desert nomads had a “mortal hatred” of flatulence, and if someone were to accidentally bomb and then laugh, “he would be cut down at once.”
Nom de Fumes
Flatus (FLAY-tus) is the scientific term for bodily gas. But there are hundreds of other fantastic words and phrases you can use when you’ve got to “drop a bomb.” Here are some possibilities:
bowel howl
right-cheek sneak
roll of thunder, hear my cry
letting the air out of my tires
backfire
hot boxing (deliberately closing the windows in a room before farting)
Dutch oven (farting under the sheets)
breaking some bad news
ponging
stepping on a mud cricket
trouser cough
thunder down under
playing the butt bongos
wind beneath my wings
breaking the sound barrier
trumping (British)
the butler’s revenge (British)
having the vapors (Victorian)
Here are some even more alarming incidents from the “bombs away” Hall of Shame:
In 569 BCE, King Apries of Egypt sent an envoy to a rebellious general named Amasis. When Amasis met the king’s envoy, he passed gas and then told the envoy to carry that message back to the king.
The envoy did so! We don’t know if he just reported “Amasis farted” or if the envoy actually tried to repeat the message “word for word.” But we do know that King Apries got so mad that he had the envoy’s nose and ears cut off. This was so cruel and unfair that popular support swung to Amasis. The rebel general ended up ruling Egypt from 569 to 525 BCE! (As for King Apries, he was eventually killed by an angry mob.)
In 44 CE, a Roman soldier in Jerusalem loudly and intentionally passed gas near Jews observing Passover. In the following riot, ten thousand people died.
Sir Thomas More wrote in 1518, “Wind, if you keep it too long . . . kills you; on the other hand, it can save your life if properly let out. If wind can save or destroy you, then is it not as powerful as dreaded kings?” (He was later beheaded by order of King Henry VIII.)
In the 1600s, an explorer on Africa’s Gambia River noted that the Ashanti people viewed flatulence as so horrible, one man hung himself after he accidentally “let one” while bowing to a chief!
In 1943, Adolf Hitler’s doctor noted that the German dictator had “colossal flatulence . . . on a scale I have seldom encountered before.” (And the papers of a high-ranking Nazi officer that were unearthed in the twenty-first century confirmed Der Führer’s gassiness.) So, in addition to having bad table manners and biting his nails, Hitler stank.
In 2003, Nickelodeon debuted a new award at its Kids’ Choice Awards: “Favorite Fart in a Movie.” The winner was Scooby Doo.
At the moment, you have about a quart of gas bottled up inside you (everyone does!), and it’s only a matter of time before it works its way out as a burp or flatulence. But where does your gas actually come from? Why, I’m glad you asked!
You Have the Right to Remain Silent But Deadly
There are hordes of bacteria living in your small and large intestines. Don’t freak out—they’re doing an important job! These bacteria break down the food moving through your guts. As the bacteria feed on the food that your body has trouble breaking down (like bran), they make tiny amounts of stinky chemicals called indole and skatole. The organisms then release these s
ubstances in the form of gas. (Those little jerks!)
So basically, it isn’t you that’s farting, it’s your bacteria. Even though only about 1 percent of your farts stink, that 1 percent can be horrible! What makes them stink? Well, for starters, it isn’t exactly helpful that they come out of your butt. And they contain hydrogen sulfide, which has that rotten-egg smell. Definitely stinky! The types of food you eat and the kinds of bacteria you have in your intestines also determine how much of a gas called methane you have in your bombs. If your intestines have a lot of methane, your farts are going to run hot and silent (otherwise known as “Silent But Deadly”).
Methane is flammable, so farts with a lot of methane can catch fire and even explode! (Only about a third of all people can produce enough methane to make this work.) Much, much worse than this are the rare occasions where medical surgeons have opened up a patient’s guts and released methane gas. If anything sparks in the operating room while they do so (like some high-tech electronics or a Boy Scout trying to start a fire in the corner), the patient’s guts will explode!
