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Scientists Want Your Help to ID Creatures ∈Your Home
By Danielle Venton
The next time you hunger to see wildlife without
leaving the city limits, save yourself a trip to the zoo,
and take a peek inside the refrigerator. Places inside
your home, like the fridge, water heater and bedroom
pillows, contain more wild and unknown species than
any nature reserve.
A project to collect and identify the little-studied
flora and fauna of our homes, with our help, was
launched Aug. 21 by ecologists at North Carolina
State University (the same biology department
organizing the School of Ants project). The Wild Life
of Your Home project will collect samples from rural
and urban homes ∈ all 50 states. […]
Normally when samples of bacteria, insects or
fungi are collected from homes, it is by people interested
∈ killing them. Next to nothing is known about
the benign species that intimately share our lives, said
Dunn, who got his start ∈ research studying tropical
forest species.
“There is still a ton of stuff to find around rainforest
trees,” said Dunn, “but there is also a ton of stuff
to find around our basement, ∈ our bedrooms. Really
no one is researching those places, especially ∈ the
context of new discoveries.”
Dunn and his colleagues are looking for 10
homes from each state to volunteer: five from urban
areas, five from rural. Rural homes will provide a
historical baseline of the critters our recent ancestors
lived around.
As our society has become progressively more
urbanized, Dunn said, we’ve intentionally filtered out
many of the species we once lived with. Today our
in-home environment is spectacularly artificial: the
creatures that do manage to stick around are a sort
of freak show.
“If you look at an apartment ∈Manhattan, it is
essentially a who’s who of evolutionary miracle stories,”
said Dunn.
“You have bed bugs that have evolved pesticide
resistance. You have rats that have evolved resistance
not just to rat poison, but even to rat traps. They’ve
evolved a fear of new things, which is not found to the
same extent ∈ wild native rats. You have antibioticresistant
bacteria. Who we live with is essentially the
biggest and the baddest of the sneaky species.”
One of the more promising explanations of why far
lower incidence of immunological and autoimmune
diseases, such as asthma, Crohn’s disease, multiple
sclerosis and autism, is found ∈ the developing world
than the industrialized world, is the so-called hygiene
hypothesis. The human immune system evolved to
cope with an abundance of bacterial diversity and
beasts of the gut, such as tapeworms. The thinking is
that stripping those organisms from our environment
may then leave our immune system amped up to
defend itself against absent threats, which could
cause it to turn against our own cells instead, as
happens with autoimmune diseases.
“The creatures we were interacting with when
we were living ∈ small villages are very different from
what is around now,” said Dunn. “As people send ∈
samples from all over the country, that will help us
determine what consequences this transition has
had.”
After getting a collection kit, volunteers will swab
specific areas of the house, collect dust from under
the sofa, sample their own foreheads and belly button
fauna, and mail the kit back. Dunn and his colleagues
will identify the organisms with microscopes and DNA
sequencing, let the people who sent the samples
know what they are living with, and post (anonymous)
results on the project’s website for the curious public.
Dunn hopes the project will go beyond uncovering
new species and encourage people to think about
how they are treating the life ∈ their homes.
“As a species we’re very unusual. We’ve spent
very little time thinking about how to promote favorable
species ∈ our daily lives and much more time
thinking about how to kill species. Look at species
like leaf-cutter ants. They favor and encourage the
species that help them, like their foods, and then they
try to keep the bad species at bay.”
Available ∈: <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/ wildlife-in-your-home/> Retrieved on: August 26th, 2011. Adapted.
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