The Secret Life of Dust Bunnies

How the humble lurker-behind-couches could “disrupt” ecology forever

There are places in my house that, no matter what I do, seem to spontaneously form their own sort of proto-life. Dust bunnies. Like the bottom of the staircase to the basement.

Each individual stair, left to its own devices, becomes a collection point for raw matter. Cat and human hair. Dust. Particles tracked in from the garden, and so on. And at the bottom of the staircase, these pieces eventually join together — through the dispersal of foot traffic — to form mega-conglomerations: dust-bunnies.

The fact is that the same basic principle of “dust-bunnization” is observable at all scales of natural phenomenon.

Consider the leaf- and debris-catching effect of a simple fence:

How tires can be used to form new coral reefs:

How mushroom mycelium grows on a substrate:

How tumbleweeds can fuse together:

All the way up to the level of galaxies and nebulae:

Really, if you look closely, you can see that it’s dust bunnies all the way up and all the way down. The natural trend toward agglomeration, conglomeration — the forming of clumps out of bits and pieces.

It seems to me then, that the humble — and sometimes astonishing — dust bunny holds in its furry hands some basic secret of life or of ecology.

I’ve been trying to wrap my mind lately around one simple question: what makes an “ecosystem?”

It’s one of those things: we know it when we see it. But what is it? A food web? An exchange network made up of entities executing their basic functions? Some kind of esoteric nested holon which miraculously seeks “balance”?

Maybe it’s all those things. But I think it’s dust bunnies. Clumps.