… and find 600 different kinds of bugs. Especially if you've got a dog or a basement.
It's all about the cotton swabs
(…)
The researchers turned to citizen science instead. They recruited owners of 730 houses across the country and had them run a swab along the upper doorframe in the main living area of their homes and outside the front door. This created a sample of the home's dust, Madden said — and that dust contains insect feces, fragments of exoskeleton and other little DNA-containing "footprints" that enable researchers to see what species have passed through.
"It is really just two Q-tips, a quick swab, and we got so much information," Madden said.
Domestic food webs
That DNA information revealed 600 genuses of arthropods inside the homes studied. Many were well-known denizens of the indoors: tiny dust mites (Dermatophagoides), pet-hair-eating carpet beetles (Anthrenus), fruit flies (Drosophila) and Indian meal moths (Plodia).
Others were more surprising….
