Dr. Lowman’s latest Nature’s Secrets column in newsobserver.com:
Who lives in your home?
Most people count their family members, plus an optional dog or cat. But entomologists – scientists who study insects – are now turning their attention to the six- and eight-legged critters that share your household. Despite the fact that millions of homes exist throughout the world, scientists have never before surveyed the entire population of arthropods living in the cracks in bedroom floors, in carpet, furniture or scampering across kitchen counters.
Humans spend billions of dollars to control insects, but it turns out an extraordinary number of species thrive within our four walls.
Scientists from the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences teamed up with N.C. State biologists to vacuum, scrape, sweep, suck, trap and crawl their way through all the rooms of 50 Raleigh households. Bringing back vials containing thousands of six-legged critters to the laboratory for analysis, the bug investigators found that an average Raleigh home contains more than 100 arthropod species.
