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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On a recent autumn morning, I did something that I have never done before, something that had never even occurred to me as a thing that I might do or should feel embarrassed about not doing: I cleaned my showerhead. It’s possible, I hope, that others of you are similarly negligent. If so, I am here to report, dear readers, that it was gross. I am the proud owner of a handsome matte-black rainfall-style showerhead. When I unscrewed it and peered inside, I was confronted with a slimy, slightly clotted dark film covering the stainless-steel interior. I sprayed it with everything I had and left it to marinate in a bucket of bleach while I called my mother to verify that showerhead cleaning was not something she’d told me to do years ago. (It wasn’t.)

My sudden showerhead conniption was set off, indirectly, by Rob Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State University. Dunn’s laboratory is focussed on getting to know humanity’s most intimate microbial neighbors—the invisible army of bacteria, fungi, mites, and molds that live on our skin, clothes, and household surfaces. Earlier this year, as part of that mission, Dunn and his colleagues launched the Showerhead Microbiome Project, sending five hundred sampling kits to volunteers across the United States and Europe. (The team is still recruiting; you can sign up online here.) My kit was No. 260. It came with a pair of blue nitrile gloves and a questionnaire that probed my cleaning and showering habits. “We’re great at inspiring shame,” Dunn said. The sampling process took about five minutes: I rubbed a cotton swab over the showerhead’s inner surfaces while trying not to gag, then used a few paper strips to test the chlorine, nitrate, iron content of my tap water, and its pH. And then, before I walked to the mailbox, I got to cleaning.

Dunn and his collaborators hope to be able to tell me sometime in the next few months which microbes I eradicated. Their first step will be to sequence the DNA present in my swabbed gunk, in order to identify what classes of organism are generally present. Since showerheads are extreme environments—Dunn called them “the desert washes of your home,” alternately soaking wet and bone dry—he expects their inhabitants to include not only bacteria and fungi but also more unusual creatures like amoebae, algae, and protists. “You may have worms,” Dunn told me. “There’s even some evidence in the Netherlands of little crustaceans.”

So my showerhead might have crabs?

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission