The First National Inventory of All Household Life (on a swab)

The latest from Robb Dunn’s lab at NCSU – really incredible research. Here is a snippet of what they found lives in your house….

“In other words, in the thousand houses people have sampled we have found evidence of more species than there are kinds of birds and mammal species on Earth, nearly ten times more. The challenge has been to make sense of what we are seeing. The first thing that became clear was that the fungi found on the outside of houses were not geographically random. The fungi on the outside of the house are a measure of where the house is and what is going on around it, so much so that if you give us a sample of dust from anywhere in the United States we can tell you where it came from within about 100 km. We can tell you based on the composition of fungal life.”

By Craig Layman| 2015-08-26T08:38:14-05:00 August 26th, 2015|Categories: citizen science|0 Comments

About the Author: Craig Layman

My lab’s interdisciplinary pursuits provide for a multi-faceted understanding of environmental change in the coastal realm. We are ecologists, asking questions that span population, community, ecosystem and evolutionary sub-disciplines. We often use a food web based perspective, exploring top-down (e.g., predation) and bottom-up (e.g., nutrient excretion) mechanisms by which animals affect ecosystem processes. All of our efforts are framed within a broader outreach framework, directly integrating science and education, using approaches such as this website.