anuary 19, 2016 by Leave a Comment
The first study to evaluate the biodiversity of arthropods in U.S. homes has found that humans share their houses with more than 500 different kinds of arthropods such as insects, spiders, mites, and centipedes.
“This was exploratory work to help us get an understanding of which arthropods are found in our homes,” said Matt Bertone, an entomologist at North Carolina State University and lead author of a paper in the journal PeerJ that describes the work. “Nobody had done an exhaustive inventory like this one, and we found that our homes host far more biodiversity than most people would expect.”
Under an initiative called the “Arthropods of Our Homes,” the researchers visited 50 free-standing houses within 30 miles of Raleigh, North Carolina between May and October of 2012. Going room by room, they collected all of the arthropods they could find, both living and dead.
They identified 579 different arthropod morphospecies — animal types that are easily separable by morphological differences — from 304 different families. Individual homes had, on average, about 100 morphospecies (between 32 and 211) and between 24 and 128 distinct families. The most commonly collected groups of arthropods in the homes were flies, spiders, beetles, ants, and book lice....
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