THE ECOSYSTEM IN YOUR HOUSE DUST
I just did a webcast thingy on my ancient book The Secret Life of Dust. That book will never die. It’s still selling well in Korea. The most recent publisher is Turkey. Anyway, I took a nostalgic trip down memory lane, and remembered all the adorable wildlife that makes its home in the carpet.
Consider a simplified ecosystem, I intoned. You have your grass, at the base of the food web. You got yer grazers converting the grass to meat. And you got yer predators, converting the vegetarians to a more rarified form of meat. That’s your basic ecosystem, right?
In your house:
The grass: Your skin flakes, which you are continuously shedding in a microscopic fountain around yourself. Your clothes, too, shed tiny particles. Your houseplants die in a tiny way every day, like every other living thing. The cracker you ate at the counter, the kids’ toys, the dog’s toys, the tablecloth and the curtains and couch, everything is dying all the time and falling apart. The detritus, which lands on the floor, is the grass.
The grazers: Hail the faithful dust mite. So devoted is he to his mission that he does not cease, come day or night, his task of shoving your skin flakes into his mouth. Across the “prairie” other players graze as well — fungi and bacteria break down your wee waste. The mites produce, to your consternation, tiny balls of dung that are easily airborne. You’re not allergic to the little grazer, but to his dung. He lacks a head, but his legs are so strong he can cling to his carpet fiber or crack in the floorboards as you vacuum.
The predators: Nature abhors a wasted grazer. Lurking between your books or beneath the sofa leg in that dent in the wood is a pseudoscorpion. This animal can be seen with the naked eye, barely: Crablike, she wields mighty claws. And when a headless might trundles past, out she springs to slash the mite, stab it, and suck it dry.
The merciless Serengeti under your couch. That’s the house dust ecosystem.
