I don’t think so. It’s supposed to be only organisms found indoors.
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Good question. We are less interested in transients but it’s often hard to tell what actually is a transient. In your case, since you knew exactly where the insect came from, we wouldn’t want you to submit it to the project. But in most cases, someone will find an insect in their home and not know where it came from. In these cases, we would want that observation submitted. For example, a house fly buzzing at a window might seem like it accidentally got inside. But the larval stage of houseflies might be quite at home on a rotten banana peel in our kitchen garbage.
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@galxe is correct; being ON the house is not sufficient for inclusion in the project. It has to be inside. Good question.
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Any indoor space qualifies, including offices and dorms! “Never Inside Alone” didn’t have the same ring :)
Inevitably, most observations will be from homes, but we are interested in all indoor spaces!
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Inside the hotel definitely qualifies.
If the courtyard is open to the sky then it does not qualify.
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No data from Greenland as of December!
Very interesting, thanks for sharing @botswanabugs. It is fascinating to consider how our homes might be the host of dramatic predator-prey scenes like the one you describe (perhaps a unique opportunity to study top-down regulation!).
We want to include observations from all types of homes, including the ones you describe above. You could note in the comments on the observation if the observation comes from homes of mud brick, thatched roof, etc.
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The mold/fungi count! Honestly, I can imagine some type of life cycle niche for molds, where they spread their spores on fruit baskets or refrigerator drawers, and those spores colonize our fruit over and over again when we take too long to eat it.
An excellent scientific query. This is exactly the kind of thing we are curious about too. We’ve wondered before whether some ants use homes as their warm winter cabins.
@bradleyallf Just a heads up that you can reply to multiple posts in one post of your own by highlighting any relevant text in another user’s post and then hovering and clicking “Quote”. This can help keep the thread organized, but also users can get put in “slow mode” if they make too many replies in a given time period in a given thread. Wouldn’t want that to happen here since this thread is super informative and interactive!
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Hello Bradley. Congratulations for this very interesting work! I have been participating gladly on the Project. Here in Mexico some few years ago, inspired by your project we create one similar for Mexico it is called “La Naturaleza dentro de nuestra casa” (https://www.naturalista.mx/projects/la-naturaleza-dentro-de-nuestra-casa) may be later we could share info about data from Mexico.
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Strangely it seems to much more of a problem in some neighborhoods than others. When I was small I lived in a house in the Phoenix metro area that had scorpions indoors, and yet other people in other parts of town never had them, and when I was older and living in Tucson I never saw any there. I should check if the Never Home Alone project has enough data to show this. (Edit: no, not enough observations. More in Texas than Arizona actually. )
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thanks for clarifying. In that case, seems like there’s a fair bit of cleaning to do in the project to kick records out, right? From a skim of observations, I can see quite a lot currently in the project that show organisms in backyards, courtyards, etc.
That should include the European mantis you showed in your original post above, no? To me at least, it’s on a verandah/in a courtyard?
Assuming the blue bars in the mantid photo are intended to keep intruders out rather than residents in I’d say the mantid is indoors.
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hmm fair point on the mantis, I guess shows my cultural ignorance. In Australia at least, I have never seen an inside foyer floor surface like that! (combination of surface type and colour)
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There are definitely a number of observations that need to be removed but I don’t think we can tell definitively from the photo that the mantis is one of them (maybe the observer
@gianni_del_bufalo can clarify?). To me it looks like a sunroom. Overall, I’d rather we have some observations that aren’t what we intend than accidentally boot observations that should belong!
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for sure!
I’m going to add a few hundred of mine when I get the time
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I must admit I’ve been a little embarrassed to record the spiders I let live in my house. I’ll start recording them and adding them to the project. Maybe I’ll even post the fruitflies that are attracted to my summer brewing efforts.
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I added those, and several others. It seems that only two of my previous indoor observations had been discovered and added by the project curators.
I can say one thing: the anole that I submitted was no transient. He lived indoors full-time, and no, I didn’t bring him in.
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Twice we rented houses on the island of Nevis that had whole sets of Anole lizards living inside of them. And some geckos too.
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