Hundreds of Creepy Crawlers, Bugs can be Living With you at Home: Study

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A new study published in the journal PeerJ reveals that various kinds of arthropods like spiders, insects and other invertebrates are living inside our homes. Entomologists from North Carolina State University looked at numerous homes of Raleigh, North Carolina to check up on arthropods that may be dwelling in different places of the house such as the attic, kitchen, bathroom, and basements.

Listing hundreds of thousands of bugs can be daunting so the researchers focused on the types of bugs. They identified more than 550 species of arthropods and came to the conclusion that a house may have an average of 100 distinct arthropod morphospecies in it.

The most common species that they were able to identify are book lice, spiders, flies and beetles. According to Matthew Bertone, one of the researchers, they found the kinds of species they found in homes to be incredulous.

"We were pretty surprised with what we found, such as the smallest wasp in the world, which is just 1mm long," he said, as reported by The Guardian. "I saw a lot of things in homes that I had never seen in the wild before, things we've previously tried to trap. There is a weird species of beetle, called telephone pole beetles, where the babies can produce babies. And tiny crickets called ant-loving ants because they are found near ant nests. I've never seen one of those before."

He added that most of the species found in the home co-exist with one another and people shouldn't freak out about the creatures they share space with.

"They're just milling around at the edges of room, eating little bits of hair and dead insects. This isn't something that should change people's behavior," he said as reported by The Washington Post.

Many of them are visitors from the outside who move inside houses when the weather turns cold. Some species then take it as an opportunity to make them into their meals.

"There are lots of cobweb spiders and also the house centipede, which is a really creepy looking creature to some people but I find them fascinating," Bertone explained. "They are very fast and if you're a cockroach, you're likely to be on their menu. Most of these things aren't pests, they peacefully co-habit with people."

Bertone emphasized that the homes they looked and scoured into are "clean homes".

"I never thought I'd see such biology in homes that were clean, not filled with junk, just normal homes. My hope is that this doesn't freak people out but people need to know their houses aren't sterile environments," he said.