Years ago, when I entered Arizona State University, I was hired in the Zoology Department as a work-study assistant to wildlife professor, Bob Ohmart. Ohmart put me to work in one of the basement laboratories with another of his assistants, Phil Smith, producing flat "study mounts" for the myriad drawers that housed the wildlife teaching collection.
My first subjects were birds from a giant chest freezer. Many were waterfowl, "collected" (a zoological euphemism) by wildlife students who were also hunters. (Phil was an avid duck hunter, and responsible for my single foray into cooking duck a l'orange.) The freezer held a startling potpourri of frozen items, wrapped in plastic, brown paper, or newspaper, brought in by wildlife officers, students, roadkill aficionados, or other odd contributors. Scribbles on the brown paper or little torn pieces of paper stuck into the bags noted where and when the frozen and often bloody item was collected. (Not long after I began, we were the recipients of two whistling swans, which are protected species. An excited hunter had called the Game and Fish Department to come see the two giant snow geese he had bagged.)
I put together a "skinning kit" in an old blue metal fishing tackle box. A cross between a sewing kit and a carpenter's toolbox. it held sturdy needles, thread, twine, wire, scissors, scalpel, probes, forceps, and pliers. Borax for sprinkling inside the skin to keep dermestid beetles away, excelsior or foam for stuffing. A hair dryer for fluffing up feathers that had been washed or dipped in solvent. Tags to tie on the crossed legs. For the occasional "live mount," I could use shiny beads or shanked buttons to simulate eyes.
I did my best. I found this job more interesting than typing book reviews for Professor Collice Portnoff in the English Department, which I was also doing to make a little money. When Ohmart picked up my first specimen, which had assumed a shape reminiscent of a racquetball racket, a grin slowly spread over his face. He said, "You've created a new species: The long-necked grebe."
Bird skins are stretchy.
I improved. In a year or so I had graduated to bats that I had helped collect in the field, usually using mist nets in which they were entangled. We placed the mist nets near small ponds, which reflected light at night and attracted the insects upon which the bats fed. One of the collecting sites was on the Spider Ranch, near Prescott, where Ohmart was inventorying birds and mammals.
Bats are mammals, warm-blooded and furry. Because their teeth vary and are important in classification, bat skulls are removed (bird skulls are left in situ) and are kept, usually in a little lidded glass vial, alongside the stuffed or "mounted" study specimens to which they belong. I loved looking at the specimens in the drawers, thinking about how they were like books in a reference library, with name, collection place, collection date. A snapshot in time.
Bats are classified in the Order Chiroptera, which translates to "hand-wing." Bats' fingerbones are greatly elongated, and the thin leathery webbing stretched between the finger bones creates the bat's wing. Bats hold on with their feet and hang upside-down when they are sleeping or hibernating, usually in large groups.
I noticed right away that some bats came with extras. With forceps I pulled off what appeared to be translucent spiders with long pinkish legs. I popped them into formalin and delivered them to the curator of the insect collection, where I learned that they were parasitic flies of the Family Strebliidae.
Some bats looked like military officers, with little round horizontal-striped badges dangling from their chests. I removed the badges and looked at them. They were insects. I could see the stripes of their abdominal segments because they did not have wings. They were bedbugs. Once you have seen and identified one bedbug, they are unmistakable.
I vaguely remembered that my mother had once mentioned bedbugs, and the horror of acquiring an infestation through a suitcase. She said, "you can smell bedbugs." I had never seen a bedbug nor smelled one. My dad built our house before World War II, and apparently my mother's vigilance had kept them at bay.
Entomologist Howard Ensign Evans includes a lively section about bedbugs in his book, Life on a Little-Known Planet. Apparently I lived in an anomalous historical era, a bedbug refractory period, because bedbugs have been around since time immemorial. I once met Evans, when he visited Arizona State. Because I had found his book so odd, so hilarious, so off-the wall, so entertaining, I expected the books' author to be antic and colorful as well. However, I found him unremarkable in person and I have no recollection of his appearance, except that he seemed a bit dour. He was an author I preferred to commune with through his writings.
Bedbugs are bloodsucking ectoparasites that depend on a host, and humans and bats are the only mammals that host bedbugs. When our ancestors lived in caves, they apparently acquired bedbugs from the bats that also occupied the caves. When humans packed their bags and left the caves for more upscale homes, the bedbugs went, too. Ectoparasites depend on hosts for their taxi service. Crowding and sociality help them along.
Bedbugs were long present in the Mediterranean, and Evans writes that they probably traveled to England with the Roman Legions. Samuel Pepys, another wild and crazy guy in his writings, reports on finding his bed "lousy," which made him "merry." Bedbugs were common in the early days of the English colonies, but were apparently unknown to the Indians. Bedbugs were more gift that Europeans gave to the New World.
Evans recounts providing the "drinks for a bedbug bacchanal" when he was a college student. He was on a trip to Florida, and he says he didn't get much sleep, but that his cabin in Lake Worth provided enough bedbugs for years of use in his college classes. Another entomologist, Robert Usinger, who wrote a long treatise on bedbugs, put his pedigreed bedbugs in vials and took them with him to conferences, where he strapped them onto his arm to feed them.
Bedbugs feed only on blood, and they're sneaky. They feed at night, emerging from hiding places in cracks, under mattresses, or behind wallpaper. They are not known to carry disease, but the site of their bites may become red and itchy. Like other bloodsuckers, they inject anesthetic and anticoagulant to keep the host unaware and the blood flowing while they are feeding, and it may be the host's reaction to those substances that causes the itching. Years ago we stayed one night at an old hotel in Buenos Aires after a long, long flight, and I noted the next day that I had sustained a number of bites on my shins and legs. I did wonder briefly, but I was so tired I couldn't have roused no matter what was feeding on me.
Bedbugs are notable in that they smell cloyingly sweet, a smell described as like "fresh raspberries," and that they engage in a kinky practice known as "traumatic insemination." The male simply pokes a hole into the female's abdomen between segments when they mate, and the number of matings can be counted by the number of scars.
Evans says the head of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology remarked in 1889 that he had occasionally met a person who had never seen a bedbug, but that such persons were rare. Insecticides, hygiene, sanitation, and housekeeping practices have given us a couple of generations in the U.S. who have not seen bedbugs, but I've read several places, including in the Nashville Tennessean this week that the bugs are making a comeback.
"Suitcases!" my mother would exclaim.
And indeed, travel was cited as a significant cause. Also the ban on DDT. But DDT was banned for good reason, and who wants to sleep in a bed dusted with DDT? "You don't want to use a heavy-duty pesticide in a sleeping area," said the responsible Orkin man quoted in the article.
The subhead of the article: "Hotel industry says pests extremely rare."
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