appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

The Washington Post

Michelle Trautwein hates to tell you, but your home belongs to bugs.
They are in your basement and your attic. They are scuttling along floorboards and windowsills. They have turned your kitchen cabinets into complex ecosystems – complete with scavengers and parasites, predators and prey. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
That is the conclusion of Trautwein’s five-year, five-continent effort to understand the creepy crawly roommates with whom we share our homes.
“We’ve been sampling houses all over the world, and it’s true globally,” said the California Academy of Sciences entomologist. “Bugs don’t respect the limitations, the borders we’ve created. They just view our houses as extensions of their habitat.”
These invertebrate interlopers, she continued, are “an inevitability of living on the planet”.

Trautwein and her colleagues have sampled homes in bustling cities and rural villages in the United States, 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. Decked out in headlamps and knee pads, 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.
For their latest paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports, Trautwein and her colleagues wanted to figure out what features of a building make it friendlier to bugs. So 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. To avoid controversy, homeowners were not told how they ranked on the cleanliness scale.

To Trautwein’s surprise, “nothing seemed to make a difference” when it came to bug 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 – prefer ground floor, high-traffic rooms with carpeting and lots of windows and doors.
“Which makes sense,” Trautwein said, “since a lot of what we live with is just kind of filtered in from the outdoors.”
When they headed down into cold, damp basements, the researchers discovered a distinct population of darkness-loving cave-dwellers: camel crickets, millipedes, tiny crustaceans.
These creatures 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 collect 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, are found almost exclusively among humans – they have evolved to live within walls, instead of trees and grass.
“That gives us the indication that this is really a kind of community that is building indoors,” Trautwein said.
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 the growing evidence that some modern ailments, such as allergies and autoimmune diseases, may be more likely to occur because we are not exposed to as many microbes when we are young. Insects may play a helpful role in hosting and spreading microbial diversity indoors.

Humans have been building homes for about 20,000 years and though we might think of ourselves and our residences as apart from nature, the reality is that we are just apes who like to build particularly elaborate nests. From a bug’s perspective, a house is as good an ecological niche as any to exploit.
Already, the initiative has yielded discoveries. The sampling of homes in Peru led to the detection of a new genus of beetles. The scientists have also sent many fly samples to taxonomic experts; several of them may belong to species that have not yet been named.
“We think the places where big discoveries are yet to be made are exotic rainforests or the bottom of the ocean,” Trautwein said. “But there’s still so much we don’t know about the places where we live.”


New insurance pays Indian workers to stay home when heat turns deadly

How India is turning to cow dung to beat the cooking gas crunch

As David Attenborough turns 100, the star naturalist’s unequalled impact over 70 years

How India is cashing in on cows to beat cooking gas crunch

Environment

Your house is a big bug habitat and you can’t do anything about it

Close up images of dead bed bugs. Photo: SCMP

A spider is highlighted by the sun during unusualy warm seasonal weather, in Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A picture of Blattella germanica, . Also known as German cockroach. Photo: HANDOUT

TO GO WITH AFP STORY US-health-offbeat-society-bedbugs,FEATURE BY SEBASTIAN SMITH Freedom, a beagle trained by Jeremy Ecker of The Bedbug Inspectors, demonstrates how he sniffs out bedbugs, on July 26, 2010 in the Queens borough of New York. Ecker and partner Oscar Rincon keep the live bedbugs in glass viles to train their dogs, that sniff out bedbugs in private homes, apartments and businesses. The tiny blood suckers specialize in feeding off sleeping bodies and this summer in the Big Apple they're enjoying the pickings of their lives, specialists say. After infesting unprecedented numbers of apartments and offices, the pests have branched out, raiding clothing stores and, notoriously, a Victoria's Secret lingerie outlet on Manhattan's posh Upper East Side. AFP PHOTO/Stan Honda

YOUNGPOST 2017 APR 22 CRITTERS: Driver ants or safari ants (Dorylus sp) in Zambia Stock photo ID: 596888006

Bugs found in food at Bangkok bistro are part of the recipe

Spaghetti with silkworm and cricket at Insects in the Backyard restaurant in Bangkok. Photo: AP

In this Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 photo, Kelvarin Chotvichit, a lawyer from Bangkok, uses a fork bamboo worms, silkworm and cricket fired before eats†at Inspects in the Backyard restaurant, Bangkok, Thailand. Tucking into insects is nothing new in Thailand, where street vendors pushing carts of fried crickets and buttery silkworms have long fed locals and adventurous tourists alike. But bugs are now fine-dining at the Bangkok bistro aiming to revolutionize views of nature’s least-loved creatures and what you can do with them. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 photo, ingredients use in some of dish from left to right, bamboo worms, silkworm, giant water beetle at Inspects in the Backyard Restaurant, Bangkok, Thailand. Ants and beetles in the kitchen? Normally that’d close down a restaurant, but bugs in the beef ragu and pests in the pesto are the business plan for one Bangkok eatery. Tucking into insects is familiar in Thailand, where street vendors pushing carts of fried crickets and buttery silkworms feed locals and tourists alike. But bugs are now fine-dining at a restaurant aiming to revolutionize views of nature’s least-loved creatures. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017. photo, Amornrat Simapsaisan, a local shop manager, watches before she ate watermelon salad with bamboo worms, at Inspects in the Backyard restaurant, Bangkok, Thailand. Tucking into insects is nothing new in Thailand, where street vendors pushing carts of fried crickets and buttery silkworms have long fed locals and adventurous tourists alike. But bugs are now fine-dining at the Bangkok bistro aiming to revolutionize views of nature’s least-loved creatures and what you can do with them. She tucked in quite happily to her watermelon and cricket salad on a recent evening. “It’s tasty. It’s munchy,” she said. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 photo, chef Thitiwat Tantragarn prepares giant water beetle on dish at Inspects in the Backyard restaurant, Bangkok, Thailand. Tucking into insects is nothing new in Thailand, where street vendors pushing carts of fried crickets and buttery silkworms have long fed locals and adventurous tourists alike. But bugs are now fine-dining at the Bangkok bistro aiming to revolutionize views of nature’s least-loved creatures and what you can do with them.(AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 photo, Kelvarin Chotvichit, eats bamboo worms, silkworm and cricket fired†at Inspects in the Backyard Restaurant, Bangkok, Thailand. Ants and beetles in the kitchen? Normally that’d close down a restaurant, but bugs in the beef ragu and pests in the pesto are the business plan at one Bangkok eatery. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 photo, chef Thitiwat Tantragarn cooks giant water beetle raviolis at Inspects in the Backyard restaurant, Bangkok, Thailand. Thitiwat, a veteran of some of Thailand’s top restaurants, together with his team, has designed a menu that features seven different insects, including ants, crickets, bamboo caterpillars, silkworms and giant water beetles.(AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

'My flat is 30 sq ft and infested with bugs': Poor forced into dismal housing shows need for rent control

A caged home in Sham Shui Po. Photo: May Tse

The 200,000-year history of how bedbugs infested our minds and homes

A Jewish refugee bows low on Feb. 16, 1947, as he receives a charge of DDT disinfectant from soldiers of the British 6th Airborne Division before leaving Jerusalem on the Cyprus-bound ship, Ocean Vigour. Photo: AP Photo/J. Walter Green

Photo: AP

News

World

United States & Canada

That is the conclusion of a five-year, five-continent effort to understand the creatures we share our houses with


Your house is a big bug habitat and you can’t do anything about it

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}That is the conclusion of a five-year, five-continent effort to understand the creatures we share our houses with

That is the conclusion of a five-year, five-continent effort to understand the creatures we share our houses with