Roomies

I have been looking for a hook to talk about something...

I was attempting to nap on the couch and my husband was sitting in his comfy chair reading when I heard him say, "Hello, Mr. Bug."

As you can imagine, this is just the kind of thing to get my attention, even if I am halfway into a snoozing state. I went to investigate and found that this had plopped down on the cushion of my husband's chair, startling him:

This is a brown marmorated stinkbug, an invasive species, alas. And in this case, what it was invading was our house. It has likely been here for some time, as it has been a while since it was warm enough outside for stinkbugs. I took its picture and then sent it outside, which was, perhaps, cruel of me, but it is where it belongs. Actually, no, it doesn't belong anywhere around here, it is an invasive insect, but anyway, I sent it on its way outdoors, and perhaps it may have found a crevice somewhere to curl up in before it froze.

And now, having found this stinkbug in my house, I have an excuse to talk about something that I read this week. Entomologist did a study of 50 houses in North Carolina, looking for bugs. Well, not just bugs, and not just insects, but arthropods - insects, spiders, and other related critters. According to one of the articles I read about it (and I read several), this was the first time a study had been done of what kinds of arthropods are living in our homes with us. As it turns out, many, many different kinds. They counted species, not individual specimens, and included living and dead ones. We may not see them very often, but they are here - in the 50 houses combined, they searched 550 rooms, and of those 550 rooms, in only 5 did the intrepid graduate students fail to find any arthropods at all. And even those 5 rooms may not have been arthropod free, as the searchers did not look in drawers or cabinets, or behind heavy furniture. So there may have been bugs hiding in those places. In total they found over 500 species of arthropods. The average number of species per home was in the 90s. The most they found in one home was 211. 211 species of insects and/or spiders in one home.

Now, the researchers were surprised at their findings, because they did not expect to find so much arthropod diversity in human dwellings. Now, you might be freaking out about now, even though you are obviously a person interested enough in bugs to be reading a blog that is primarily about bugs, but you don't need to be freaking out. Yes, you have bugs in your home, but it doesn't mean that your house isn't clean. It just means that it provides the right habitat for something tiny and multi-legged. Of all the creatures they found, they didn't find very many of the kinds of insects that are generally classified as pests - cockroaches, bedbugs, or termites. The biggest categories were arachnids (spiders), Diptera (flies), Coleoptera (beetles), and Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants).

Now, I have always figured that the reason so many bugs get into my house is because I live next to the woods, but these houses were all in different neighborhoods, within 30 miles of downtown Raleigh, NC. The study was done a couple of years ago in the summer and fall, in 2012 (I don't know if this is just hitting the many news outlets now because someone found out about it and everyone else jumped on the story, or if the results of the study have only recently been finished and published). From what I read, the entomologists plan to do further analysis, to see if there is a difference in bug populations based on the age of the home, whether or not people use air conditioning, and other criteria. I have to say that it all has me curious about how many species of insects and arachnids are in my house - and I have been disappointed for days that I have not seen any I could photograph to give me an excuse to blog about this - I saw a moth and a ladybug in the last couple of days, but neither in positions where I could get their picture. I am not planning to do a general survey of my whole house, however - though I could find a few in the spider web on the window a few feet away from where I am sitting right now.

One interesting thing I read about all of these insects is that a lot of them are helpful - obviously, the spiders eat insects, and some of the insect species are insectivorious, too, but others eat things like dead skin cells and toenail clippings (I have to admit, I was not at all grossed out by knowing how many species of bugs are living in homes, but I was grossed out by the thought of them eating toenail clippings, for some reason), so they are helping to clean your house, in their own, disgusting, little ways.

The point is, they're here. They're not hurting us. And that is life.