Hi fellow inat users! I am one of the authors of the study along with @rqy-yong, below I try to answer some of your questions about the paper/news article.
@SQFP … If someone has access to the paper (I don’t): I’m curious about whether they count the tenant in ‘Mammalia’. And the tenant’s nasty diseases in e.g. ‘Fungi’, too.
We had a trespasser so humans counted, but we weren’t intending to count humans. For the same reason, we counted dogs and cats.
@annkatrinrose … they mention the full species list being available in supplemental data. However, I can’t find that list
The full list is available on github at (see the file house_records_RY, note you need to run the code to get tallies, or at least look carefully at the dates).
https://github.com/matthewhholden/HomeBiodiversitySurvey
We have an iNat project for this paper (note many species that are hard to photograph did not make it on iNat)
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/40-tamar-st-microblitz
Finally, the article is open access (we paid $ for it with an institutional agreement) but is for some reason paywalled before final proofing, which at academic pace maybe 2024. The academic journal thing is such an annoying scam.
@jasonhernandez74 … Including the yard inflates the number. I wonder how many species it would be if only the interior of the house was included?
That’s a good question. If I had to put a number on it, I’d go close to 50:50. Most of the moths were first detected inside so that gets you 350+ species inside right there (no aircon, windows open, and visibility is so much better inside). All 6 species of cockroach, 13 mosquitos, most of the fruit flies and house flies, lacewings, etc. Since the windows were often open the inside v outside is actually not so easy to define.
@whaichi … Article title: in your house. Article contents: on our property
Fair enough, we took some liberties with the title, which is a play on words (house of a thousand corpses) but we do explain that we included the yard in the paper as you mention
@carnifex … They apparently did not bother to check for plant pathogens - they should’ve found dozens of (true and false) mildew and rust fungus species on both wild and ornamental plants. Plus all the other microfungi growing on living plant matter
Our rules were that each species had to be identifiable as an organism with the naked eye, so nothing microbial would count. We perhaps didn’t seek out plant pathogens that may just look like markings on a plant, perhaps due to expertise, but also perhaps due to some markings not definitively being identifiable as definitely an organism, at least to us. Remember our rules are that the literal organism had to be identifiable as an organism. A marking on a plant caused by a microbial organism would not meet that definition. It is important to note that the vast majority of plants were weeds and doing extremely well. That all said, you are probably right that we underestimated the pathogens. We grew no ornamental plants, but did have some food plants some of which counted but some did not, depending on whether they satisfied our definition.
@jnstuart … For the bird list at my house, I considered the airspace above my house and yard all the way to the ionosphere. If a high-flying bird went over that I could see from my house, it counted.
We did something similar to that but had a hard time distinguishing whether it was within the verticle bounds or not, so decided to go with identifiable from the property as that was easier to determine. That rule is mostly only key for the birds since any insect identifiable from the property is basically on the property.
@robotpie Honestly what also helped was getting a camera setup with macro capabilities.
I had a cheap macro-clip for my iphone, and we also had a low-power dissecting microscope. A mix of records are photos in the field vs under the microscope. But no dissections were allowed. All were released alive. We did use the fridge to help cool things down if they were moving too much to get a good photo.