People pay no attention to their belly buttons, or the the thriving ecosystem that lives on our skin. So when a team from North Carolina State University adopted the focus of revealing the ecosystem that lives within our belly buttons, people became interested. The naval is the least scrubbed area of skin, offering researchers a chance to study as close to a pristine microbial landscape as possible. What they found, after swabbing 60 volunteers, was a total of 2, 368 bacterial species, and 1,458 of them may be new to science. The biodiversity within our belly buttons matches that of a rainforest because about 8 species were found on at least 70 percent of the subjects, appearing in huge numbers, much like a rainforest for in a rainforest the flora varies but there are always certain dominant tree types that almost always appear. In my opinion, these findings, though a little creepy, are very interesting and do provide researchers with an even bigger question now of "why do these particular bacteria even show up?"
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/11/121114-belly-button-bacteria-science-health-dunn/
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/scientists-say-your-belly-button-is-like-a-beautiful-rainforest-with-up-to-107-different-species/story-fneuz9ev-1226525606985
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