• Xylophagia—eating wooden toothpicks
• Geophagia—eating clay or dirt
• Amylophagia—eating laundry starch and paste
Say Cheese!
On the island of Sardinia, there’s a kind of pecorino cheese that is purposely left out to rot until it is covered in maggots. It’s intentionally eaten that way, with live maggots jumping in every direction! Formaggio Marcio is now illegal but still popular on the underground market. We wonder if the word sardonic—a kind of dark sarcasm—has any connection to this maggot-filled cheese.
Slippery Devils
A woman in Fairfield, Connecticut had a surprising discovery when she went to cook seven eels for the Night of the Seven Fishes celebration. One was still alive and looking back at her, perhaps praying desperately for a Night of Six instead.
Mold—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Eat your fruit, but not if it’s squishier than a pile of maggots (unless you’re on the island of Sardinia, Say Cheese!) and starting to grow a gray fungus called mold. Is mold ever okay to eat? The answer is yes. Moldy cheeses, like Gorgonzola, are considered by many to be a culinary treat. The bacteria that is injected into the cheese to create the bluish moldy veins is also the bacteria found on smelly feet.
Is that Blood in My Pudding?
Is blood pudding as medieval as it sounds? That depends. First of all, it’s more of a sausage than what we think of as pudding. According to the BBC, blood pudding is pigs’ blood mixed with onions, oatmeal, barley, flour, pork fat, and various herbs and it’s quite a popular breakfast item in the land of fish and chips. There is actually even a veggie version available made by Real Lancashire Black Pudding Company. It’s called V Pud, and the creators took special pains to “simulate the properties of blood”.
Did You Know? Moldy cheese has its own official day: October 9.
Putting the “ew” in Zoology! You don’t have to look any farther than Animal Planet to see some of the yuckiest stuff around.
Banana Slugs
These slimy suckers can grow up to nearly a foot long, but true to their name, they don’t make tracks very quickly, so you’d have no trouble peeling away from them. Their most distasteful feature is the mucus that oozes out of them for protection. Just make sure you don’t mistake them for their edible namesakes: one lick of this mollusk’s underbelly and your tongue will go numb.
Giant Squid
It sounds squishy, and it is. This mysterious sea creature is mostly muscle and an invertebrate, meaning that it has no hard skeleton. Despite its impressive size (the heaviest nearly breaks the scales at 2,000 pounds), it floats easily because of the ammonia in its muscle, which is lighter than water. These slimy suckers have plenty of everything: eight arms, three hearts, two tentacles—both much longer than their body, the largest eyes in the animal world, and up to 300 suckers to grab onto prey. If you could get up close, you’d see that each sucker is lined with loads of tiny teeth, close to 50 on each one. All together, you’re talking about 15,000 choppers.
Tattle-Tail
People always want to know which is the biggest animal… so naturally, being a Gross-o-pedia reader, you will want to know which animal is responsible for the biggest poop. And maybe even how big the poop itself is. Well, the blue whale takes first prize for biggest animal. Are they also number one for number two? That’s hard to say. They usually have the runs, which makes the output rather difficult to measure. Still, we can assure you that whale’s tail leaves one giant whale trail.
Crooked Shark Poop
If sharks aren’t creepy enough, with their ability to smell a single drop of blood in 25 gallons of water, they also poop in an unusual way—it comes out in a spiral! Scientists who study fossilized poop found spiral coprolite and identified it as coming from a shark because their intestines have a matching shape.
Coprolite—fossilized poop
I Want to Suck Your Blood… Using an Anticoagulating Agent
How do vampire bats get their victims to spill their blood? Well, they have an anticoagulating agent in their saliva, which prevents the blood from clotting.
Unpopular Scavengers
Why do vultures get such a bad rap for preying on wounded animals or on those who have already been partially eaten? It seems like a gentler method of survival than attacking a perfectly healthy animal in the prime of its life. Maybe it’s the way that they creep up on victims or peck at their eyeballs. And, of course, they do pee on themselves to cool off and regurgitate food into the mouths of their young, so, on second thought, the ostracized vultures fit squarely in the confines of a book on gross stuff!
Be an Expert! Vultures have bald heads so that they don’t collect blood and bits of dead flesh in their feathers after they poke around inside a carcass.
This Means War
The Portuguese man-of-war looks like a jellyfish, but it’s actually a colony of invertebrates all clumped together. The tentacles can extend down to as much as 165 feet underwater. If that’s not scary enough, washed-up dead men-of-war have still been known to sting people!
One-Stop Shopping
The chicken is an efficient little animal. Its underside has only one hole, and all these things come out of it: eggs, poop, and pee. (Sperm travels through the same shoot—opposite direction.) Here’s hoping there aren’t any traffic jams!