Author: Erika Engelhaupt / Source: Science News
Never Home Alone
Rob Dunn
Basic Books, $28
As I write this in my basement office, a sticky trap lies beneath my desk catching whatever insects wander by.
Its current haul is pretty typical: a cricket, a spider and some small flies. But as Rob Dunn writes in his intriguing new book, Never Home Alone, I’m missing a lot if I think that’s all that lurks beneath my slippers.Dunn has carved out an unusual niche as an ecologist, studying the myriad fauna that inhabits houses. These creatures are mostly small, such as microbes and insects, but that’s only one reason they’ve gone largely undocumented.
There’s also a bias worth noting. “As ecologists, we’re trained to study life in ‘nature,’ which we have come to believe means the absence of humans,” Dunn writes. But it’s impossible to know what harmful or helpful species might live alongside us, he argues, if no one ever looks. So as Dunn relates in this backstage pass to his work, he and a team of fellow renegades set out to catalog life in unnatural spaces.
The team immediately found surprises. In their first look at house dust, Dunn and colleagues identified almost 8,000 bacterial species, including many new to science. What’s more, an average home had about 100 species of arthropods (SN: 9/3/16,…
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