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 in all 50 states.

“It’s Lewis and Clark without all the danger,” said Rob Dunn, ecologist and project leader. “It is easy to assume that people living in different environments will have different microbes growing around them, but we haven’t had the geographic data yet.”

‘An apartment in Manhattan is essentially a who’s who of evolutionary miracle stories.’

Normally when samples of bacteria, insects or fungi are collected from homes, it is by people interested in killing them. Next to nothing is known about the benign species that intimately share our lives, said Dunn, who got his start in research studying tropical forest species.

“There is still a ton of stuff to find around rain-forest trees,” said Dunn, “but there is also a ton of stuff to find around our basement, in our bedrooms. Really no one is researching those places, especially in 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 in 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 in wild native rats. You have antibiotic-resistant 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 in 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 in small villages are very different from what is around now,” said Dunn. “As people send in 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 in their homes.

“As a species we’re very unusual. We’ve spent very little time thinking about how to promote favorable species in 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.”

Image: Michael Goodin/Flickr.