It’s been many moons since 500 or so intrepid citizen scientists twirled a Q-tip in their belly buttons for science.
With that swab we did two things:
- We plated the sample and created a personal microbial portrait of your belly button flora.
- We performed molecular analyses to identify the microbes (and their relative abundances) residing in your navel.
We quickly delivered on the portraits. The molecular part… well, our science is SLOW. It took a few years, but we FINALLY finished those analyses.
So today we are proud to share a new and improved Belly Button Biodiversity website, complete with a new personal results portal.
We invite participants and all other interested navel-gazers to dive in and Explore the Data.
Marvel at the microbial portraits. Contemplate how many species live in our umbilici. Explore the relative abundance of each and every microbe in over 400 new interactive pie charts. Compare participant biodiversity to each other and the average.
And then, more importantly, tell us what you learned! We built a new TalkBack Forum for you to share your findings, insights and hypotheses.
What are you waiting for? Head over to navels.yourwildlife.org ASAP!
Many thanks to Dan Fergus, Neil Mccoy, Lauren Nichols, and Megan Thoemmes for doing the heavy lift that made the re-design and delivery of personal results possible.
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