We’re psyched you’re here.

We’re a team of biologists, science communicators, students, and citizen scientists who are passionate about exploring the ecological frontiers that exist right under our noses, from the surface of our skin to our backyards and neighborhoods.  Shockingly, these familiar places where we spend our every day lives have been so little studied. We hope to change that.

We started with a little project looking at the microbes inside our belly buttons. Who knew we would uncover a rainforest of life in there? (Literally, there are just as many microbial species in your belly button as there are in a comparable patch of tropical rainforest.).

Now we can’t stop asking questions. Or poking around in the dark corners of our basement. Or swabbing the dust on top of the doorsill that has been untouched for YEARS.

Stay tuned for some cool stuff coming down the pipe.  Soon, very soon we’ll be sending out kits to the first batch of 500 people who signed up to sample the microbial wild life of their homes. With our collaborators from the new Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, we’ll be swabbing your armpits (for science, of course!). And you won’t believe the aliens we’ve uncovered in basements and crawl spaces across North America.

We want Yourwildlife.org to be a hub where you can learn cool stories about biodiversity, share observations of nature in your every day life, and participate in the whole scientific research process from the development of hypotheses to data collection and analysis (including the required head-scratching and hair-pulling that comes along with puzzling results).

So go ahead, poke around a bit. Read, comment, and contribute to the conversation. Sign up for our e-newsletter, tweet us, or better yet, get involved.

We’re on the edge of our seats with excitement. You should be too.