Your Home May Have Hundreds of Tiny Roommates: The Arthropods Living in Your House

You may have a lot more roommates that you might have first thought. Scientists have conducted the first ever study to evaluate the biodiversity of arthropods in U.S. homes and have found that humans share their houses with any of more than 500 different kinds of arthropods.

"This was exploratory work to help us get an understanding of which arthropods are found in our homes," said Matt Bertone, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Nobody had done an exhaustive inventory like this one, and we found that our homes host far more biodiversity than most people would expect."

In this latest study, the researchers visited 50 free-standing houses within 30 miles of Raleigh, North Carolina between May and October of 2012. Going room by room, the scientists collected all of the arthropods they could find, both living and dead.

The researchers identified no fewer than 579 different morphospecies of arthropod from 304 different families. Individual homes had, on average, about 100 morphospecies 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.

"While we collected a remarkable diversity of these creatures, we don't want people to get the impression that all of these species are actually living in everyone's homes," said Bertone. "Many of the arthropods we found had clearly wandered in from outdoors, been brought on cut flowers or were otherwise accidentally introduced. Because they're not equipped to live in our homes, they usually die pretty quickly."

The findings reveal that we may be harboring quite a few species at any point in our homes. But it's important to keep in mind that these arthropods are relatively harmless.

The findings are published in the journal PeerJ.

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