Dark Banquet (35 page)
Authors: Bill Schutt
*83
Not everyone is enamored with the therapeutic uses of leeches, as was recently illustrated by the development of an artificial leech by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. Basically, the device is a glass vacuum chamber with separate tubes for suction and the introduction of the anticoagulant heparin. Inserted just under the skin, the disk-shaped tip rotates to inhibit blood clotting.
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*84
Less than three years after returning to work, my dad had a major stroke that crippled his body and brain for the last thirteen years of his life. William A. Schutt Sr. died in the spring of 1992 at the age of seventy-one. He had survived the poverty of the Great Depression, D-day, a nightmarish boating accident, and a horribly disabling stroke. He was the bravest man I have ever met.
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*85
Rudy actually finished the story by reiterating that leech therapy shouldn't be undertaken at home or without the supervision of a physician.
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*86
According to New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, there were no complaints of bed bugs in fiscal year 2003, 79 complaints in 2004, 928 in 2005, 4,638 in 2006, and 6,889 in 2007.
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*87
In the Helmsley case, a Mexican businessman alleged that he'd been mauled by bed bugs during his stay at the hotel. The case was quickly settled out of court. The Mandarin Oriental case, however, did not go away quietly, possibly because the plaintiffs were a prominent New York City celebrity attorney and his wife. As of March 2007, their lawyers had filed a twenty-page five-count complaint alleging that the couple had suffered over a hundred bed bug bites in an assault that continued after they returned home and the bed bugs moved into their Manhattan apartment. The couple was seeking over four million dollars in damagesâwhich works out to around forty thousand dollars a bite.
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*88
This muscle is actually what you're eating when you chow down on the succulent meat inside a lobster, crab, or shrimp.
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*89
Ecdysiast
was also the term coined by the early-twentieth-century reporter and critic H. L. Mencken (famous for his coverage of the Scopes “Monkey trial” of 1925). Mencken had been contacted by Georgia Southern (“a practitioner of the art of strip-teasing”) who was concerned about negative connotations people had about “stripping.” Ms. Southern asked Mencken to “coin a new and more palatable word to describe this art” and he did. “I sympathize with you in your affliction,” Mencken wrote back to her. “It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way to theâ¦zoological phenomenon of moltingâ¦which is ecdysis. This word producesâ¦ecdysiast.”
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*90
Molted arthropod casts and the feces dropped by their former owners are the real allergens that plague those who are hypersensitive to “dust.” Although I'm sure there are a few allergists who have chosen to spare their patients some of the following details, the discarded arthropod outerwear and microscopic excreta come from dust mites, tiny creatures more closely related to spiders than to insects. Fortunately for us, dust mites are not blood feeders (although, as we'll see later, there are hundreds of mite species that are). Instead, they feed on the approximately twelve grams of skin flakes that humans shed each day. This epidermal debris would accumulate into gigantic snowdrifts were it not for the hungry mites.
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*91
When I was a child, soft-shelled crabs were expensive and available for only a few weeks each summer. What I didn't know was that they were actually just ordinary blue crabs
(Callinectes sapidus)
that either didn't get the good hiding places after a molt or had been tempted to leave them by the irresistible allure of rotting chicken entrails. Nowadays though, farm raised soft-shelled crabs can be purchased year-round since their molts are regulated by human-administered hormones.
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â 92
The largest terrestrial arthropod, by far, is the coconut crab
(Birgus latro),
which can weigh up to 8.8 pounds (four kilograms).
Birgus
is a hermit crab relative but without the snail shell. It copes with the “soft-shell vs. gravity” problem by molting in the safety of its burrow, where it remains for up to thirty days. Depending on which entomologist you ask, the largest insects are either New Zealand grasshoppers, called wetas, which can weigh as much as 2.5 ounces (seventy grams), or giant beetles belonging to several genera like
Goliathus, Titanus,
and
Megasoma.
The world's largest spider (class Arachnida) is the giant bird-eating tarantula
(Theraphosa blondi),
which can weigh up to 4.25 ounces (120 grams) and whose legs can span twelve inches (30.5 centimeters). Its venomous fangs can reach one inch (2.54 centimeters) in length. Some centipedes (class Chilopoda), like the Amazonian giant centipede
(Scolopendra gigantea),
can reach more than twelve inches in length. These predators feed on pretty much anything that movesâincluding rodents and bats, which are subdued with a venomous bite before being devoured. The heaviest lobster on record is forty-four pounds, six ounces (about 20 kilograms), which is five times heavier than the coconut crab and roughly three hundred times heavier than the largest insect.
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*93
Those of you looking for a more detailed explanation on the concept of evolutionary constraints should read Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin's terrific essay, “The Spandrels of San Marcos and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme.”
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*94
Pheromones are sprayed or otherwise released into the environment by a variety of creatures, including insects and many mammals. Different pheromones communicate information on territorial boundaries, availability of females for breeding, and location of trails (to food or back to the nest).
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*95
Bed bug copulation is actually quite dangerous for the female since it entails a violent exercise known as traumatic insemination. During this process, the male pierces the female's abdominal wall with his intromittent organ and injects his sperm into the wound. This practice, in which the female's external reproductive structures are not involved at all, may have evolved as a way to circumvent female mating resistance. Not surprisingly, traumatic insemination has some negative effects on female bed bugs, increasing the risk of infection and reducing life span and reproductive output.
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*96
Various insects and other arthropods prey on bed bugs. These include several species of ants, including Pharaoh ants
(Mnomorium pharaonis),
a bug called the “masked bed bug hunter”
(Reduvius personatus),
spiders
(Thanatos flavidus),
centipedes
(Scutigera forceps),
and pseudoscorpions
(Chelifer cancroids).
Finally, although an 1855 paper reported that cockroaches fed on bed bugs, this claim has not been supported and the two insects may, in fact, “live happily together in the same house.”
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*97
The owners of Advanced K9 Detectives (out of Milford, Connecticut) claim that their certified Bed Bug Dogs can sniff out infestations within minutes.
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*98
Parasites switching hosts is a common occurrence in natureâand it's one of the ways that new species emerge. Recently, scientist David Reed and his co-workers compared the DNA in species of sucking lice that prey on either humans or gorillas. They hypothesized that gorillas actually spread these blood-feeding parasites (arthropods belonging to the order Anoplura) to ancient human ancestors around 3.3 million years ago. Since that time, the lice evolved alongside their new hosts (i.e., underwent coevolution), eventually becoming different enough to be considered a separate species from the gorilla lice. For example, as humans lost most of their body hair, the lice became adapted to live in thatches of human pubic hair, where, unlike gorilla lice, they are transmitted mainly through sexual contact. The researchers believe that the lice were originally spread to humans via one of three routes: sexual contact between gorillas and early humans, ancient humans killing and handling gorillas (parasites often spread from one host to a predator of that host), or gorillas and humans sharing communal areas.
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â 99
Bed bugs 'n' beans was apparently a popular medicinal dish (showing up in Pope John XXI's
Thesaurus Pauperum
). But here, rather than mixing the two ingredients together, those suffering from fever were instructed to place the bugs into a hollow bean before swallowing it.
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*100
This was two years before Pliny (a scholar, historian, and naturalist) choked to death on volcanic gas and dust at Stabiae, shortly after the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
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â 101
According to Usinger, both of the Quintus Serenus verses were quoted by T. Mouffet in 1634 and translated by E. Topsel in 1658.
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*102
Hopefully the name referred to the French translation (“peerless”) and has nothing to do with those chocolate drops covered with little white pellets of sugar.
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â 103
Firr is an Old English take on the word
fir
and refers to evergreen conifers of the genus
Abies.
These trees are generally considered unsuitable for use as timber.
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*104
There are significant parallels between blood feeding and sap feeding in bugs. They both employ hypodermically sharp mouth parts to tap into nutritious fluids, pumped under relatively high pressure, through special vessels (blood and phloem vessels, respectively). Additionally, both techniques commonly transmit pathogens to the food sourceâharming them.
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*105
Other vestigial organs of note include hind limb claws (or spurs) in pythons and boa constrictors and teeth in the developmental stages of toothless baleen whales (like the blue whale) and some anteaters. In humans, there's the coccyx (formerly caudal or tail vertebrae in our distant ancestors) and the vermiform appendix (the remains of a larger, endosymbiont-laden, intestinal out-pocket called the cecum). Additionally, wisdom teeth are an indication that natural selection had an easier time making our jaws shorter than it did decreasing the number of teeth in those jaws. And stress-induced goose bumps apparently functioned to raise the hairs of our ancestors, making them look larger in the presence of predators, potential enemies, or competitors.
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â 106
The term
bug bear (Henry IV)
was an early term for “scarecrow” or “bogeyman.”
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*107
To some researchers, this makes them blood-feeding predators and not parasites.
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*108
Remember this little factoid the next time you come across a bird's nest and are tempted to bring it home to show your kids. And, on a related topic, any newly dead animal is likely to be crawling with ectoparasitesâand many of them will gladly jump off their deceased hosts and on to you (at least temporarily), should the opportunity arise. You should also think about this one the next time your cat brings home a recent kill.
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*109
According to pest-control experts, developing hobbies like dusting and vacuuming are solid preventive measures, while storing stuff under your bed is
bad juju.
They also recommend sealing all cracks and crevices in your home with silicon or caulking compound. (Potential harborage sites for bed bugs include cracks in hardwood flooring, bed frames, moldings, as well as the spaces between walls or floors and semipermanent structures like bookshelves.) You should also paste down or replace peeling wallpaper or contact paper, fill in nail holes, and seal all holes in floors and walls where bed bugs might enter from outside. And before you sit down, check your toilet paper tubes and curtain rods.
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*110
Pest-control experts do suggest that you cover your mattress with an airtight, hypoallergenic cover, which not only prevents bed bugs from getting out (if you did have them) but also prevents new ones from getting in.
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â 111
According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the easiest way to determine whether a mattress is new or refurbished is to look for an attached label. New mattresses should have a white label stating that it contains “all new materials.” Depending on the state, used mattresses
may
have a tag warning consumers that the mattress contains used materials. In New York, for example, sellers of used bedding must attach “a 15 square inch yellow labelâ¦which contains the phrase âUsed Material' in prominent print.” With this in mind, purchasing a mattress with no tag should be avoided and the FTC recommends that you not let the heavy plastic wrapping dissuade you from locating the tag when your mattress is delivered. The FTC further suggests that refusing delivery of untagged mattresses is a wise move, as is getting the salesperson to write “new” on your receipt at the time of purchase.
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*112
According to integrated pest-control specialist, Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, as of 2007, one major bedding company covers the mattresses it removes from homes in plastic before placing them in their trucks.
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