Dark Banquet (22 page)

They were then so few, as to be little taken notice of; yet as they were only seen in Firr-Timber, 'twas conjectur'd they were then first brought to England in them; of which most of the new Houses were partly built, instead of the good Oak, destroy'd in the old.
^†103

(John Southall,
A Treatise of Buggs,
17)

Southall's interviews supported the claims made in several early European dictionaries and encyclopedias that bed bugs did not exist in London prior to the Great Fire but were subsequently carried to England in timber imported from the American colonies. Years later, documents would reveal that the bloodsucking pests had actually been recorded in England since 1583 (nearly one hundred years before the famous London blaze).

Miffed Americans returned fire in the eighteenth century by nicknaming the tiny bloodsuckers “red coats” and insisting that their own bed bug problems had arrived from Europe with the early colonists. In this regard, the Yanks were apparently correct since entomologists now believe that
Cimex lectularius
spread from an origin somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region, across much of the world, via human colonization and overseas trade.

Finally, Southall set out to describe bed bugs for his readers—with decidedly mixed results:

A Bugg's Body is shaped and shelled, and the Shell as transparent and finely striped as the most beautiful amphibious Turtle; has six legs most exactly shaped, jointed and bristled as the Legs of a Crab. Its Neck and Head much resembles a Toad's. On its Head are three Horns piequed and bristled; and at the end of their Nose they have a Sting sharper and much smaller than a Bee's. The Use of their Horns is in Fight to assail their Enemies, or defend themselves. With the Sting they penetrate and wound our Skins, and then (tho' the Wound is so small as to be almost imperceptible) they thence by Suction extract their most delicious Food, our Blood.

(John Southall,
A Treatise of Buggs,
19)

Currently, scientists recognize around seventy-five species in the family Cimicidae, but only three of them regularly feed on the blood of humans:
Leptocimex bouti,
which also preys on bats in western Africa and South America;
Cimex hemipterus
(sometimes known as the tropical bed bug), which feeds on poultry and bats in the New and Old World tropics (including Florida); and
Cimex lectularius,
the common bed bug, which preys on humans, bats, poultry, and other domesticated animals just about anywhere in the world.

Reflecting their worldwide distribution, Robert Usinger listed over sixty native names for bed bugs. Besides “red coats” and “heavy dragoons” (after the scarlet-coated British cavalry), additional English nicknames included “mahogany-flat,” “B. Flat,” and “scarlet ramblers.” “Norfolk Howard” was a goof on the aristocratic family name of the Dukes of Norfolk, and in the first half of the twentieth century, the blood-filled hordes were known as “the Red Army.” Bed bugs have also been referred to as “chinch bugs,” probably because
chinche
is the Spanish word for bed bug. Unfortunately, this has led to some confusion since the name chinch bug has also been appropriated by the lygaeids, a related family of soil-dwelling insects notorious for the damage they inflict upon grasses and grains.

During my visit with entomologist Lou Sorkin, I asked him about the old perception that bed bugs were found only in association with hobos, seedy motels, and filthy conditions.

He shook his head. “That's been the mind-set for quite some time, but in the old days, only people who had money could heat their homes, so that's where you'd find the infestations. And once central heating took off, so did the bed bugs.”

I glanced over at the colony. The jar was sitting on Lou's worktable, and now that the creatures within it weren't being warmed, breathed on, or sniffed, most of the miniature horde had retreated back into the shadows of their cardboard harborage.

The bug man went on to explain how increased temperatures not only attracted bed bugs and amped up their activity, but it also sped up their life cycle. “Higher temperatures lead to faster maturation to the adult, reproductive stage.”

I would later learn from Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann's presentation that a combination of high temperature (85°F) and high humidity could condense the bed bugs' entire life cycle into a period of three to four weeks. She explained that initially this might sound like a good thing, because the pests died more quickly, but they could also crank out a new generation in less time—leading to an overall increase in population size.

“So can cooling down an infested home get rid of bed bugs?”

“Not really,” Lou said, shaking his head. “Lower temperatures can slow down their maturation process but it also increases their life span.”

Like other insects, when bed bugs are chilled their metabolic rates decrease.

“Nymphs can go for months and months without feeding and adults can live without a blood meal for a year or longer.”

Well, here was a clue I hadn't read about on Web sites or in the rash of recent newspaper and magazine articles on bed bugs. Rather than becoming a plus in the war against them, the creatures' adaptive response to low temperatures presented a significant problem: bed bugs could survive for months with no food, in empty (and presumably unheated) apartments. Harkening back to the enormous amount of misinformation on bats, the ability of bed bugs to survive prolonged periods without their human hosts apparently led to a fairly common belief that they could feed on juices extracted from wood and paper, or even digest wallpaper glue. “Paste they love much,” declared self-proclaimed genius John Southall in his
Treatise on Buggs.

I guess it might have been almost comforting to think that these tiny home invaders were munching glue or savoring newspaper ink. Comforting that is, compared to a pair of grim realizations that not only did bed bugs maintain a strict diet of blood, but unlike exotic vampires like bats and leeches, these hardened city dwellers were living (and feeding) right here among us.

Okay, so we already know that bed bugs are arthropods, like crabs and spiders, but let's get a bit more specific, starting with the question, what are “bugs”?

Bed bugs and their fellow cimicids belong to a large suborder of insects known as Heteroptera. These, in turn, belong to an even more inclusive grouping, the order Hemiptera. Although some hemipterans do feed on blood, many don't. Aphids, for example, the enemy of farmers and gardeners everywhere, feed on plant sap and cause
serious
damage in the process.

But no matter what they feed on, to be a card-carrying hemipteran, you need to have a needle-sharp, dual-channeled proboscis. After piercing the skin (or rind) of whatever it is they happen to feed on, hemipterans inject saliva through one channel of their proboscis. Compounds within the saliva begin the process of digestion, and almost immediately, the bugs start snorking up partially digested food through the other channel.
^*104

In addition to bed bugs, the Heteroptera contain a parade of insects with nasty-sounding names like stink bugs, squash bugs, and water scorpions. Assassin bugs (Reduviidae) are another notorious family of hemipterans. Unlike their bed bug cousins, though, some assassin bugs can transmit serious ailments to the humans they feed upon. In fact, these insect vampires (also known as cone-nosed bugs or kissing bugs) deposit feces containing the parasitic flagellate
Trypanosoma cruzi
onto their victim's skin. Itching the bug bite rubs the infected excrement into the wound, allowing the parasite to enter the bloodstream. From there it can invade organs like muscles. In severe cases, the ailment is known as Chagas' disease, in which the parasites can cause serious damage to nerves of the gastrointestinal tract and the electrical conduction system of the heart. Charles Darwin was, in fact, bitten by assassin bugs in South America, and it's been suggested that Chagas' disease may have been responsible for the lifelong health problems he experienced upon his return to England.

Although
bug
can refer to diseases like influenza, as well as just about any insect or small arthropod (e.g., spiders and ticks), only heteropterans are considered “true bugs” by entomologists. This is because they all share some rather specific anatomical characteristics. For example, many insects have two pairs of wings (forewings and hind wings). In most heteropterans, the forewings are hard at the base and membranous toward the tip (hence their name, from the Greek for “different wings”). One take-home message is that “all bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs.”

Strangely enough, although bed bugs share anatomical, developmental, and behavioral similarities with other heteropterans, they don't have functional wings. The posterior wings of cimicids are absent and the anterior pair is vestigial. Vestigial organs are nonfunctional remnants of structures that
were
functional in the ancestors of that organism. For example, blind cavefishes (belonging to the families Amblyopsidae and Characidae) have tiny, functionless eyes. By all indications, these sightless swimmers evolved from ancestral species that
could
see. Presumably, some of these fish migrated into new environments (caves), where they eventually lost their visual senses in much the same manner as other troglodytes like blind salamanders and some cave crickets. The sightless eyes that remain result from portions of the fishes' genetic blueprint (its DNA) that have remained unchanged from the ancestral versions. As a result, these old sections of DNA are still cranking out remnants of the old anatomical features—even though they don't function anymore.
^*105
In bed bugs, one pair of stubby functionless wings (hemielytra) is all that remains of what were probably two working pairs of wings in bed bug ancestors. Presumably, the loss of wings occurred as these ancient bugs evolved a lifestyle in which birds and bats spread them from place to place, thus rendering their own wings unnecessary.

Speaking of bugs, the English word
bug
apparently derives from the Welsh
bwg.
In its original form,
bug
(or
bugg
) referred to a ghost or hobgoblin, which is how it appeared in the
Coverdale Bible
(1535) and in several works by William Shakespeare (including
Hamlet
).
^†106
In the 1622 play
The Virgin Martyr, bug
appears to have been used for the first time to describe an insect infestation (“We have bugs, Sir!”). Until then,
wall lice
and
Cimices
had been used to describe
Cimex lectularius.

Of course, since the seventeenth century, the word
bug
has developed a number of additional meanings. The phrases “putting a bug in someone's ear” or “having a bug up one's butt” may very well have originated with the medicinal use of leeches (but I'm only speculating here). Used as a verb,
bug
can describe certain unwelcome attentions or the covert placement of surveillance equipment. It can also refer to the equipment itself or a computer or technical glitch. Drinking “bug juice” means chugging an inferior grade of alcoholic beverage (except in ancient Greece, where the term was taken literally and seems to have been the equivalent of huffing down a bean-and-bug-flavored Alka-Seltzer). In any event, bug juice could leave the drinker “bug eyed” or as “crazy as a bed bug” and in no way capable of driving certain formerly ubiquitous German autos. Finally (and
thankfully
), the phrase “snug as a bug in a rug” first appeared in an eighteenth-century farce,
The Stratford Jubilee,
whereas “Sleep tight, etc., etc.” has two possible origins. According to columnist Cecil Adams (the Straight Dope), “sleeping tight” may refer to a time when many mattresses were made of interwoven strands of rope attached to a rectangular wooden frame. To sleep well, these mattress ropes had to be pulled tight and reknotted (lest they sag like a hammock under the weight of the sleeper). The alternative explanation is that in this case
tight
refers to the word's archaic use as an adverb meaning “soundly,” “properly,” or “well.”