House Guests 

"There's no shortage of papers on cockroaches and termites. But there are hundreds, potentially thousands of house dwellers that are neutral to beneficial that we know nothing about."
May Berenbaum, entomologist, University of Illinois

"I would have told you I had four species of spiders [living in his home]. When we looked, we found ten in my house -- and that turns out to be the average [number to be found in a home]."
"Some of these species are super cool [like the spider that spits on its prey to kill it]."
"The best we can do is hope to sway that [persuade people] population to species that benefit us, rather than do us harm. But first we have to understand who's there."
"Every surface, every bit of air, every bit of water in your home is alive. The average house has thousands of species."
"They're really a great example of where we've gone too far in trying to kill everything around us, and it's had unintended consequences."
"Our bodies don't exist but for the species that live on and in them. We can't scrub ourselves free of the rest of life. I hope to be never alone in that sense — to be really isolated from the rest of life would be a very sad thing."
Rob Dunn, applied ecologist, North Caroline State University

Humans would do better to accept many of the life forms that share our space, than to scrub them all away, says ecologist Rob Dunn. // Basic Books

People who are interested in the biosphere closest to them are being encouraged by Dr. Dunn to share their personal observations of arthropods -- insects and their relatives -- from around the world, through his project named Never Home Alone; basically noticing insects that live beside them directly, in their very homes. His goal is to gather at minimum ten thousand observations -- and anyone can join his search with the use of the online nature-identification platform iNaturalist.

Dr. Dunn himself was largely unaware of the creatures with six legs sharing his home. It occurred to him and some colleagues to initiate a census of fifty homes in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives. Some houses in his city had over 200 arthropod species, much more than he found in his own home. Most people are oblivious to the presence of these small creatures in their homes. And when they do encounter one the instinct is to remove it, whether to carry it out-of-doors, or to kill it. Without realizing that where that one came from far, far more exist.

Spiders are among the most prevalent household pests, crawling their way into two out of three American homes. At the same time, the most common creature-based phobia in the world is arachnophobia, the fear of Spiders. So when most homeowners spot a Spider, they tend to employ the nearest form of DIY pest control –a vacuum or shoe.

Once Dr. Dunn and his team of researchers got their project off the ground they discovered similar numbers of bugs residing in homes from Sweden and Peru and all points between. With this data in hand the project assumed exotic proportions of discovery; each home a prospective Amazonian wilderness. Made all the more intriguing when a few of the insects brought to their attention turned out to be new to science, never before seen and identified. Yet even those that were known appeared strange; researchers have no idea what these minuscule creatures eat, or where their original habitat was.

There was so much detail to be absorbed and studied in each home, hours were spent in each survey they had originally undertaken in Raleigh. So they turned to iNaturalist -- an app with users across the globe which can geolocate and identify specimens from photographs with the use of artificial intelligence -- for assistance. The researchers created a page for the project, approaching the platform's most frequent users to contribute. That was in July, and by October the page had welcomed over 3,000 submissions of over 800 species from more than one thousand participants world-wide.

The tropics has sourced some of the most intriguing data; one crab spider named for its sideways and backward scuttle seems ubiquitous. Dr. Dunn is driven to analyze how these species are globally distributed. He found that in Raleigh the surveyed houses were populated with bugs originally from the Fertile Crescent, arriving to the Americas along with European colonists. Patterns steadily emerge. As for example, pets in a home guarantee more insect diversity, along -- logically -- with homes where windows are more frequently left open.

Booklice are tiny light-brown bugs whose eyes bulge but they aren't lice, and nor are their activities monopolized by inhabiting books since they feed on starch, preferring the moist atmosphere of a kitchen or a bathroom. Dr. Dunn wants to emphasize that with the use of pesticides beneficial spiders are destroyed, speeding the evolution of resistant cockroaches and bedbugs. Since spiders feed on insects such as those -- along with earwigs, flies and clothes moths, they are beneficial in their habitation in a home.