Do not, I repeat do NOT let my daughter ever know this! But apparently our homes belong to the bugs!
Thankfully we don’t have a basement or an attic but they do scuttle along the floorboards and windowsills!
Worst of all they have turned our kitchen cabinets into complex ecosystems – complete with scavengers and parasites, predators and prey. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
And when I say ‘our’ I include all you readers in this too! Because according to American entomologist, Michelle Trautwein, no matter how much we clean our homes, these insects still share our homes!
She spent five years trying to understand the creepy crawly roommates with whom we share our homes.
“We’ve been sampling houses all over the world and it is true globally bugs don’t respect the limitations, the borders we’ve created. They just view our houses as extensions of their habitat,” she says.
“These invertebrate interlopers, are an inevitability of living on the planet.”
Trautwein and her colleagues have sampled homes in bustling cities and rural villages in the US, Australia, Japan, Peru and Sweden. Soon, they hope to visit Africa and Antarctica.
In 2012, the team convinced 50 homeowners in Raleigh, North Carolina, to let them look for bugs inside their houses. The scientists spent hours crawling around on the floors of the strangers’ homes, gently swabbing for critters and depositing their finds in tiny plastic vials.
They wanted to find out what features of a building make it friendlier to bugs. They scored each home on a number of metrics: degree of cleanliness; amount of clutter; presence of pets, pesticides, dust bunnies; number of windows and doors.
And here is the surprising factor – ‘nothing seemed to make a difference’ when it came to insect diversity.
Each home had an average of 100 species living in it, regardless of how often the residents cleaned or how many pets they had!
Most arthropods – the group that includes insects, spiders, millipedes and many other spineless creatures capable of giving you the heebie-jeebies – did prefer ground floor, high-traffic rooms with carpeting, with lots of windows and doors.
When they headed down to cold, damp basements, the researchers discovered a distinct population of darkness-loving cave-dwellers: camel crickets, millipedes, tiny crustaceans.
These insects are not just temporary interlopers; they have formed food webs as complex as any you might find in the outdoors. There are prey animals, like scuttle flies, fungus gnats and book lice, which feed on sloughed-off skin and dusty detritus that collects in corners and under furniture. There are opportunistic feeders, like ants. And there are predators — cobweb spiders, ground beetles.
Some creatures, like the German cockroach, found almost exclusively among humans – have evolved to live within walls, instead of amid trees and grass.
“That gives us the indication that this is really a kind of community that is building indoors,” says Trautwein.
The study dealt with diversity, rather than quantities of bugs and Trautwein was quick to clarify that there’s a difference between ordinary household bug communities and an infestation.
But she believes some level of bug diversity in a home is probably healthy. Trautwein noted there is a growing evidence that some modern ailments, such as allergies and autoimmune diseases, may be more likely to occur because we aren’t exposed to as many microbes when we are young.
Even so I still don’t like the idea of them sharing my home with me and if my arachnophobic daughter found out – oh boy!