Homes of the rich have more creepy crawlies: Average property is home to more than 100 species with wealthier areas having greater variety
- They found that bigger the house the greater the insect variety
- The lush landscaped gardens in wealthy areas allow wildlife to thrive
- Most of the uninvited guests were deemed to be harmless
Rich people’s houses are home to more creepy crawlies, research shows.
A study of the bug life in homes in the US found the average home to boast more than 100 different species of insect.
And the wealthier the area, the greater the variety.
The California Academy of Sciences researchers said their find bucks the ‘general perception that homes in poorer areas harbour more indoor arthropods’.
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Rich people’s houses are home to more creepy crawlies, research shows (File photo)
Writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, they described how they ‘thoroughly sampled all living and dead arthropods found inside 50 homes through active searching and hand collecting’.
The focus was on collecting as many different breeds as possible, meaning it was not necessary to ‘collect all ants if they were the same species’.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the bigger the house, the greater the insect variety.
However, neighbourhood wealth was also important, with richer areas home to more bugs and beasties.
This tallies with previous research, which found that wealthier neighbourhoods boast a greater variety of plants, birds, bats and lizards – a phenomenon dubbed the ‘luxury effect’.
A study of the bug life in homes in the US found the average home to boast more than 100 different species of insect (File photo)
The researchers said that the lush landscaped gardens in wealthy areas allow wildlife to thrive.
Some of this then makes into ‘bedrooms and basements’.
Study author Misha Leong, an evolutionary biologist, said: ‘We hypothesise that affluence contributes to indoor arthropod richness by directly influencing plant coverage and diversity outdoors, which in turn influences the prevalence of plant-associated arthropods that, then, find their way indoors.
‘Our results suggest a broad-ranging luxury effect that appears to cascade from choices made in landscaping and urban planning to the indoor environments of individual houses.’
There is one finding that those who are afraid of spiders and other creepy crawlies can take comfort form – most of the uninvited guests were deemed to be harmless.
There is one finding that those who are afraid of spiders and other creepy crawlies can take comfort form – most of the uninvited guests were deemed to be harmless (File photo)
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