8 Strange Things Scientists Have Tasted

Inquiring Taste Buds Want to Know

scientists, strange food, weird eats

(Image credit: Image courtesy of Monika Bright, University of Vienna, Austria.)

Curiosity about the world drives scientists, and for many researchers, that thirst for knowledge extends to their palates. Early scientists included doctors who tasted urine for diabetes and explorers who ate new species. These days, technology brings researchers new taste extremes, such as billion-year-old water and deep-sea squid. Here are some of the strangest things people have tasted as part of their research.

Ocean's delight

giant squid, rare images

This image of the long sought-after giant squid is part of a Discovery Channel documentary on the largest deep sea creatures. (Image credit: Discovery Channel)

Eating their species of study is a rite of passage for marine biologists. Plankton soup, vampire squid and deep-sea tubeworms are some of the more unusual examples gathered by LiveScience. Scientists who work in the shallow ocean get tastier morsels, though, such as sea urchin gonads — the sushi delicacy called uni.

All the animals

longest-living animals, long life

While not receiving the award for longest-living animal, the galapagos tortoise is right up there, living more than 150 years. (Image credit: Courtesy of Yale University.)

Scientists in the 1800s didn't just eat their species of interest: They ate all the species. Charles Darwin is the most famous of these adventurous eaters. From his college days dining on brown owls to his worldwide travels trying tortoise and armadillo, Darwin devoured everything he encountered. Another audacious eater from this era is William Buckland, who is said to have eaten mouse, mole and the preserved heart of King Louis XIV. Buckland was a geologist and paleontologist who described the first full dinosaur fossil, the Megalosaurus.

Creepy-crawlies

a meal made with insects

Although many Westerners may react to the idea of bug-eating with disgust, insects make up a part of the traditional diets of about 2 billion people. (Image credit: Hans Smid / bugsinthepicture.com)

Eating insects isn't strange in and of itself. They're great sources of protein, and many non-Western cultures create tasty dishes with bugs and grubs. But some entomologists take eating bugs a step further, for shock and awe (and in the name of science). For instance, many scientists often snack on non-food species, such as corn borers, in an attempt to convince undergraduates (or journalists) to eat bugs.

Steppe jerky

a mammoth fossil unearthed in Siberia

A mammoth unearthed in Siberia (Image credit: Semyon Grigoriev | North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk)

The stories of scientists eating mammoth go back more than 100 years, but are more legend than truth. That's because the animals emerge from their icy tombs as stinky, freezer-burned jerky, thanks to pre-freeze decomposition and thousands of years of thawing cycles.

However, one confirmed tale comes from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Paleontologist Dale Guthrie and colleagues, who excavated a 36,000-year-old steppe bison carcass called Blue Babe, stewed and ate extra neck tissue while prepping the bison for display. The meat was tough and had a strong "Pleistocene" aroma, Guthrie wrote in the book "Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe" (University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Ancient ice

ice core research

An international research effort on the Greenland ice sheet set a record for single-season deep ice-core drilling in the summer of 2009, recovering more than a mile of ice core that is expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate change in the future. (Image credit: NEEM ice core drilling project)

The polar scientists are another group with a long tradition of imbibing their research. Out on the ice caps, there's no freshwater except for what's trucked or flown in. Melting ice provided a good source of drinking or washing water for generations of explorers. The advent of ice coring, to get a record of past climate preserved in older ice, meant scientists could really taste the past. Pieces of broken ice cores, not needed for research, became ancient ice cubes. Other circular cores were fashioned into drinking cups. Za vas!

Oldest water

Sampling water in a deep mine

A scientists takes a sample of water from a mine deep underground in Ontario, Canada. The water turned out to be 2.6 billion years old, the oldest known water on Earth. (Image credit: B. Sherwood Lollar et al.)

The oldest ice on Earth is pretty tasty, because it lost its impurities through squeezing. But the oldest water on Earth tastes terrible, Barbara Sherwood Lollar told The Los Angeles Times in an interview. Lollar and her colleagues discovered the 2.6-billion-year-old water in a mine beneath Earth's surface in Ontario, Canada. The water pocket is 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) deep and full of minerals from the surrounding rock, such as iron and salt. It's also more viscous than tap water, she said.

Self-testing

What's inside of one-sixth of the world's population and is a thousand times smaller than the head of a pin? It's Helicobacter pylori, the pesky bacterium behind ulcers.

What's inside of one-sixth of the world's population and is a thousand times smaller than the head of a pin? It's Helicobacter pylori, the pesky bacterium behind ulcers.

Self-infection is the pinnacle of ingesting your research. Australian Barry Marshall drank a culture containing H. pylori to prove the bacteria cause stomach ulcers. The theory had been ridiculed, but Marshall's developing stomach ulcer was the first stepping-stone toward proving the link. He later won the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine with long-time collaborator Robin Warren for discovering the link between H. pylori and peptic ulcer disease.

My diagnosis is ...

urine test cup

(Image credit: Chris Townsend | Dreamstime)

While early healers often missed the mark on diagnosing disease, due to lack of knowledge and understanding of the body, diabetes is one illness they could catch with a taste test. The only problem is the examiner, someone called a "water taster," had to drink the patient's pee. People with diabetes produce sweet-tasting urine. That's the origin of the name diabetes mellitus — mellitus is the Latin word for honey. Along with symptoms such as frequent urination and weight loss, sugary pee was a clue that helped lead scientists down the road to discovering insulin.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

Becky Oskin
Contributing Writer
Becky Oskin covers Earth science, climate change and space, as well as general science topics. Becky was a science reporter at Live Science and The Pasadena Star-News; she has freelanced for New Scientist and the American Institute of Physics. She earned a master's degree in geology from Caltech, a bachelor's degree from Washington State University, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.