Ecology

Abstract

The idea of house dust as an ecosystem was first presented by van Bronswijk (1972a) to describe the basic house dust food web consisting of skin scales, microorganisms and mites. The diversity of bacteria, fungi, mites and insects that have been recorded from house dust, together with their temperature and humidity preferences were elaborated in a later paper (van Bronswijk, 1979), but consideration of the characteristics of house dust as a discrete ecosystem were constrained to some generalisations about the trophic interactions between various organisms. However, there is a great deal more to ecosystems than simply figuring out who eats whom.