The Soft Inner Belly :

A recurrent theme in movies is that the alien beast ravaging a village, or all humankind has a soft underbelly and often, an even softer inner belly. Who can forget the scene in Men in Black when the character played by Tommy Lee Jones entices the alien, a giant, incredibly strong and aggressive member of the “Bug” race, to swallow him whole? The “Bug”, looking suspiciously like a very large cockroach, and about to escape with a pendant containing the power to destroy worlds, complies. Now, to my mind, Tommy Lee Jones is facing certain destruction. After all, he needs to avoid being cut to shreds by the many large and sharp teeth in the mouth of the beast. Then he somehow needs to circumvent being dissolved by gastric contents –which are always depicted as copious and slimy. Of course, since this is a movie, neither is a problem. Once swallowed, he simply fires up his gun and shoots the alien from within. It turns out, movie directors are on to something. As reported in The New York Times, bombardier beetles, also known in Japan as the “farting bug”, routinely survive being swallowed by toads. Bombardier beetles have a unique defense mechanism. When threatened, which includes being swallowed by a toad, they eject a hot (almost to the boiling point of water) noxious chemical spray from the tip of their abdomen.  The ejection causes a popping sound. In an experiment, scientists fed bombardier beetles to toads from Japan. Shortly after the toads swallowed the beetles, the scientists could hear popping sounds. Almost half the toads eventually vomited the beetles. Vomiting occurred 12-107 minutes after ingestion. Amazingly, all vomited beetles were still alive and all but one survived at least another two weeks. In another movie (Jurassic Park), the character played by Jeff Goldblum says, “life finds a way.” So perhaps movie directors simply are keen observers of the world around them and recreate that magic on the big screen.