Don’t eat icicles — they might be full of poop, Iowa meteorologist warns

An Iowa meteorologist’s hilarious — and gross — warning about icicles has gone viral on TikTok.

Katie Nickolaou took to the platform Wednesday to call public attention to a very important detail about icicles: They shouldn’t be eaten.

Why? They main contain bird poop.

Nickolaou’s TikTok shows a video of a woman snapping a long icicle off a roof and chowing down, to which Nickolaou wails, “Please don’t do that!”

She goes on to explain that icicles are formed from water that melts off roofs and runs down the sides of buildings as it freezes. The problem, she says, is that roofs are also covered in a lot of bird poop that’s picked up by the water as it melts. The poop ultimately freezes into the icicle.

That means that when you eat an icicle, “you’re eating poop,” Nickolaou says.

Her video has been viewed more than 2 million times as of Friday and garnered nearly 43,000 comments.

Many commenters said they’d keep eating “poopsicles” regardless of their contents.

“I’m still gonna eat it,” one person wrote.

“A little bird poop never hurt anyone,” wrote another.

“Is that supposed to stop us?” a third wrote.

Others were confused as to why anyone would need to be reminded to not eat them.

“I feel like this is common sense that icicles are not clean/shouldn’t be eaten,” one person wrote on Twitter.

“lol it don’t take being a meteorologist to have common sense icicles are run indeed just frozen run off water whatever poop and god knows whatever else that was on your roof is in there,” wrote another.

Nickolaou is a Michigan native and the meteorologist for Siouxland News at Sunrise, a morning program on the Sioux City-based KMEG. The news station covers Northwest Iowa, Northeast Nebraska and Southeast South Dakota.

This story was originally published January 1, 2021 at 2:57 PM with the headline "Don’t eat icicles — they might be full of poop, Iowa meteorologist warns."