RALEIGH Creatures. They're everywhere: in your hot water heater, under your bed, even in your bellybutton. You don't notice the vast majority of them, but Rob Dunn wants to change that.

The North Carolina State University professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has been working for years to help people see the scientific wonders in the everyday world, and he's leading a new research project that aims to reach them where they live. Quite literally.

Dubbed "The Wild Life of Your Home" and launched earlier this year, the effort has already drawn 6,000 volunteers across the country who will be mailed sample kits used to determine what kinds of organisms might be sharing their living space, such as fungi, insects and microscopic bacteria.

The goal, Dunn said, is not only to learn more about types of organisms that rarely have been studied, but to enlist the public in a significant research project at a time when scientific literacy still remains a weak point for many Americans.

"We know so little about these environments that are all around us that just by looking we open up all these new doors," Dunn said.

The first round of 70 or so kits, all from North Carolina, are due to arrive at the university this week. But the inaugural sampling of a home here provided Dunn with what he said are tantalizing hints of what the project might learn.

"There was a trail of pollen all through the house," he said. "We found fungi that are normally only associated with desert conditions. The TV had things that nobody had ever seen in a house before."

Dunn, trained as an ant scientist, has been making a habit of research like this. An ongoing project launched before the home-sampling effort has sent out kits to hundreds of people who provide samples from their bellybuttons, which are analyzed for micro-organisms.

The eyebrow-raising nature of the project gets people in the door, but once they're in the science begins, said Jiri Hulcr, a researcher who works with Dunn on the bellybutton project. By piquing the interest of the public, they've managed to get more than 500 samples, by far the largest sample size in a study of this kind, Hulcr said. And by using cutting-edge DNA sequencing techniques to analyze the organisms, they've been able to determine that, instead of the 10 or 20 different types of bacteria researchers had previously expected to find, most people have between 60 to 100 different types living on them.

At first blush, it might be hard to understand why so many people are willing to help find out what kind of mysterious creatures live on their television or in their navel. Not so, said Raleigh resident Elaine Hardin, who's volunteered for the home sampling project.

"I think this will be an eye opener for folks who vacuum and, perhaps, have carpets cleaned once or twice a year ...," she said. "I know that I'm interested, since my older dog has declared that her 'cave' of habitation."