A few days ago my writer friend, Erin Dionne, posted this status update:

Erin is a fantastic writer, incidentally. You should read her new book, if you haven’t yet.

She followed up with

(Loree Burns is another writer friend, who has written several nonfiction books about insects. If you don’t yet have them, you should run out and buy all of her books immediately.)

Erin’s post sparked a lively conversation in the comments, where many of Erin’s friends began to speculate about just how long a live insect, swallowed whole, might survive inside her stomach. The fiction writers were nice—“the stomach acid would kill it right away.” Those of us who write nonfiction weren’t so sure. How long could a fly survive in an anaerobic environment full of hydrochloric acid? I surmised it would stay alive “thirty minutes, tops.” Loree, who joined the conversation a bit later, recommended that Erin read Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia for an overview of aeroplankton. “He describes the stuff we breathe as ‘a vault of insect-laden air from which falls a continuous rain.’ Of bugs. We’re all breathing them in more than we think.” Kind of like krill for land animals. For some reason, Erin didn’t seem to take comfort in our comments.

And luckily for Erin, I happened to be reading Mary Roach’s Gulp, and had just reached a section (chapter 9, pp 167 – 177) where she discusses this very topic: could a nonparasitic creature swallowed whole survive inside a stomach for any length of time? For instance, if your pet reptile swallowed a live mealworm, could that mealworm chew its way out of your pet reptile’s stomach (as has been rumored on various internet listserves)?

In fact, mealworms actually can live awhile inside the reptile’s stomach, although they go dormant once they’ve been swallowed. Still, they don’t get digested quickly. Turns out, hydrochloric (gastric) acid isn’t nearly as caustic as you might think. Roach quotes a herpetologist who reported watching a crab-eating snake (Fordonia leucobalia) vomit up crabs three hours after eating them, and the crabs stood up and ran away. Another scientist tells the story of his dog, Gracie, a part-Doberman, who vomited up a two foot garter snake in the middle of the floor during a dinner party. Gracie had been inside the house for at least two hours. When his wife picked up the snake with a wad of paper towels, it flicked its little tongue out at her. (160) (I cited this latter story to Erin in a follow up comment. Judging by the responses, some of the fiction writers didn’t seem to have the proper takeaway.)

Update: I just emailed Erin to ask if she minded being featured in a blog post about swallowing live living things, and she said no, but that in fact, she hadn’t actually swallowed her bug. “It flew into my mouth, *stuck to my uvula* and I horked it back out,” she reported. Well, now we’ll know in case the worst happens next time.

By Siga [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons