(Credit: Andrew Kerr/Shutterstock) Home is where the heart is. And it’s also where the beetles, spiders, ants and flies are. A study published Tuesday in the journal Peerj by researchers at North Carolina State University found that we share our houses with over 500 species of arthropods — you know, insects, spiders and other creepy crawlies. In the first study of its kind, the researchers visited 50 homes near Raleigh, North Carolina and searched high and low for multi-legged cohabitants, ending up with more than 10,000 samples.
Analyzing the collected samples one by one turned up a staggering array of arthropods, comprising not only common species like house flies and dust mites but also crickets, aphids, lacewings and hundreds more. In all, they found 6 classes of arthropods with 34 orders and 304 families represented. Houses averaged 62 families apiece. Although they found over 500 species in homes in total, ...
