Bugged

by David MacNeal

  10  We have to admire Henri Viallanes’s diligent eye for identifying the optic and olfactory lobes of insect brains. With assistance, he took a lithographic photo—at 400 times magnification—of the bisected brain of a larval fly in 1886. As far as scientific art goes, the bulbous organ is stunning.

  11  This includes the three-day, Bangalore-held “Maggot Meeting” of 2010.

  Three

    1  Before overseeing the assassination of Osama bin Laden, former CIA director Leon Panetta oversaw the sponsorship of designating the monarch butterfly as the national insect. Or tried to, anyway. The bill introduced to the House in 1989 touted the monarch as a native and “unique representative,” but only received half as many congressional cosponsors as the “Democratic,” “hard-work[ing]” honeybee, even though, as mentioned in the Lodi News-Sentinel, it was of “Italian import.” The position remains vacant, so write your congressperson now.

    2  Coincidentally, Peter Jackson’s visual effects company, Weta Digital, began the same year.

    3  A particular meme online razzing our overreaction shows a soldier rigged with a flamethrower setting a field aglow—suitable enough for Starship Troopers—with the caption “There’s only one way to kill a spider.”

    4  Paging Kafka.

    5  In 2014, an alternative and by no means extreme solution to ridding phobias was undertaken in the form of a left temporal mesial lobectomy.

    6  Affectionate love bite this is not. For that we turn toward Costa Rica’s peanut-headed lanternfly, colloquially known as la machaca. Legend portends its deadly venomous sting leaves its victims with but one cure: have sex within 24 hours. Kudos are of course owed to the centuries-old bullshit artist who popularized this harmless insect across South and Central America. For a real insect-derived sexual stimulant, I recommend the Brazilian wandering spider. A single bite will give a man an hours-long erection. If it replaces Viagra, I’d like to propose an ad campaign designed by the Monster Energy drink people for a pill called “Boner Venom.”

    7  The go-to wrangler for decades has been entomologist Steven Kutcher, whose wide range of credits appear in Jurassic Park, the Spider-Man trilogy, We Bought a Zoo, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and, most famously, Arachnophobia. Kutcher employs a variety of tricks to guide and place insects, from cooling them to slow their metabolisms to constructing walking paths out of threads. It’s Hollywood smoke and mirrors at its smallest.

    8  Afterthought: perhaps the strangest bug sex goes to those humans with formicophilia. Sufferers of this rare deviant sexual behavior can only experience arousal and orgasm from ants, snails, cockroaches, or “other insects creeping, crawling, [and] nibbling” their skin and genitalia.

    9  Science illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger documents anomalies from copious radiation. Her harrowing sketches of insects near nuclear waste facilities and fallout zones, like Three Mile Island, capture the insects’ haunting yet beautiful flaws: dented eyes, lopsided wings, stubby antennae, and missing legs. As she writes in After Chernobyl, “We cling to images that do not correspond to changing reality.”

  10  Enamored by ancient Chinese traditions, Mr. Fang Liao professionally breeds and installs live cricket ensembles, and has learned many secrets to their musicality, like dripping resin on their stridulating legs and wings for lower octaves. Literally rosining up that bow.

  11  In West Africa, locals perform a “scapegoat ceremony” to ward locusts off. It entails selecting a town member—I imagine the least popular—who is then decorated and given gifts right before being banished forever in hopes that locust swarms will follow. Returning is punishable by death.

  Four

    1  Never mind bugs’ ability to hit incredible altitudes. In 1926, US Bureau of Entomology man P. A. Glick hooked a sticky trap to a monoplane to determine the migration pattern of insect pests miles above land—what he deemed “the ‘plankton’ of the air.” On those first initial flights he found thousands of bugs at 2,000 feet and even a lone orb weaver spider as high as 15,000 feet.

    2  Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn—a psychopath embittered by the prospect of the North winning the Civil War—was a prototype bioweapon attacker. In 1864, the good doctor, later known as the “Yellow Fever Fiend” or, my favorite, “Dr. Black Vomit,” mailed clothes collected from his yellow fever patients in Bermuda to Northern cities to infect whoever opened the packages.

    3  This was of course followed by a lengthy rebuke from my mother about long-distance travel: “Go to Puerto Rico—follow some mosquitoes around there! Listen to your mother. You’re driving me crazy!”

    4  The room’s smell has to be leaps and bounds better than in 100-degree, 95 percent humidity rooms lined top to bottom with maggots gnawing on rotting meat. In the 1950s, the USDA sought to combat a screwworm fly epidemic eating southerners’ livestock from the inside out. Doing that required the release of 50 million sterile flies per week reared on a factory level. Besides the squirming pupae, these putrid vats contained lean ground meat, bovine plasma, and a formaldehyde-water solution. Separated five-day-old pupae were dumped into canisters that were then loaded into irradiation chambers like submarine torpedoes.

    5  A 1961 paper by Israeli biologists Micha Bar-Zeev and Rachel Galun details their A. aegypti LPS method by using a magnetic jar. Practical? Not so much. Larvae in their fourth stage (instar) of development were fed iron filings and were separated from the pupae when placed in a magnetic field. Those that didn’t die from iron “clogging of the alimentary canal” evacuated the contents before pupation. As a kid fond of large magnets, I can’t imagine how fun these bugs would be.

    6  As one who enjoys his whiskey, I highly recommend a complex, oak-barrel blend of this rum. Specifically ESALQ-USP’s Cachaça Fina, which is found in this overgrown distillery hidden in plain sight in Piracicaba’s College of Agriculture. As I and my Brazilian acquaintances learned, it’s very delicious. Let’s just say my 700 ml bottle never made the trip home.

    7  The havoc inspired musician Charley Patton to write his guitar-plucking tune “Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues” around 1908. Other epidemic-inspired hits include Charles Johnson’s 1909 ragtime ditty the “Kissing Bug Rag,” about America’s deadly outbreak of Chagas disease, which continues to kill 20,000 annually.

    8  When females tunnel, they emit pheromones and sounds to attract males. In an effort to prevent their attack en masse, scientists at Northern Arizona University and a composer teamed up for a peculiar collaboration. David Dunn recorded beetle calls (chirps and stridulations) within trees by burrowing a meat thermometer rigged with acoustic recording gear into the trees, becoming an effective eavesdropper. Later, scientists piped in the tunes of antagonistic rival males—and a Flagstaff rock station for variety’s sake—into a slab of phloem. The results in the tunes area were significant. Not only did beetles tunnel a quarter as much (0.4 cm vs. 2.1 cm per day), but laid only one egg per pair as opposed to the 204 eggs elsewhere. Next up? Broadcasting the sound—akin to a tweety bird being strangled—over entire landscapes.

  Five

    1  Borrowed from the “sleep tight” bedtime rhyme, which may originate from the bed’s “latticework of ropes” as pointed out by bedbug historian Michael Potter. In the 1500s, straw mattresses sat atop ropes that required tightening. The mattresses were burned once they became overly infested with bugs. Thirty thousand years ago, cave dwellers—a researcher from the University of Witwatersrand theorized—burned hay beds to avoid a restless night’s sleep as C. lectularius gravitated from bats to man.

    2  A range of communities report infestations, but ritzier homes tend to swiftly nip the issue in the bud. Due to the high cost of extermination (averaging $1,500 per room at times), bedbugs tend to linger. In 2016, researchers at Rutgers University reported on 2,372 low-income New Jersey apartments in four cities, inclu
ding Paterson. Of the 88 residents who knew they had infestations, 57 percent of them had known for six months. Thirty-six percent had known for an entire year.

    3  I should note my interviewee had the “prestigious” honor of gracing the cover of the September 2013 issue Pest Management Professional magazine.

    4  Mining DE, however, is hazardous enough as to cause lung cancer. DE is comprised of the “skeletal remains of diatoms” (i.e., fossilized algae), the makeup of which includes low levels of silicosis-causing crystalline silica. Researchers from the University of Washington looked at the health records of 2,342 California miners from 1942 to 1994 and came away with perturbing results. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration strives for agreeable conditions to keep carcinogenic exposure to 1 out of 1,000 men. DE miners had an increased risk of 19 out of 1,000, proving exterminators aren’t the only vulnerable ones on this battlefront.

    5  Guilty.

    6  A wiser choice of beverage compared to the DDT-guzzling professors and prisoners of the 1950s. Advocating lecturers famously took large gulps of DDT “to demonstrate its benign nature.” If that wasn’t enough, Dr. Wayland Hayes of the Centers for Disease Control enlisted US prisoners across several penitentiaries to ingest 35 milligrams of DDT for two years. No immediate effects were reported. However, one group of researchers traveled to an Italian island 50 years following a mosquito eradication program. The surveyed locals exposed to the insecticide showed an increase in liver cancer.

    7  A bedbug-detecting dog, according to one New York Times article, can cost as much as $11,000.

    8  Add to that extremity the kerosene-doused feathers used to eliminate bedbugs into the twentieth century. This is certainly less dramatic than the occasional blowtorch taken to them today.

    9  Perhaps my favorite embodiment of this is Saturday Night Live’s “Bug Off” skit. The commercial parody has Will Ferrell advertising a medieval cockroach torture bait trap in which tweezers split the legs in different directions and beat the roach with them, as a “red-hot, metal coil burns off its reproductive organs” and a metal arm pendulums food “out of reach.”

  10  In 1996, Mississippi was hit with an insecticide-related fallout affecting a wider area. A poison intended for boll weevils known as methyl parathion was illegally obtained by exterminators and applied for two years to 1,500 homes and businesses, according to one report. To avoid a complete disaster (since it had caused over 20 deaths in the past), 1,100 people were relocated.

  11  Just don’t annoy a PCO on the clock. An ornery Manhattan taxi driver made the mistake of nearly sideswiping one. Unbeknownst to the cabbie, the PCO had just finished capturing a bag full of roaches from a nearby bar, which he poured into the cab’s window after a heated confrontation.

  12  The advent of which goes back to C. V. Riley’s nozzle. His 1884 applicator invention debuted in front of an audience of French vintners suffering from the Great French Wine Blight as a means of dispersing chemicals to fight mildew and grape phylloxera. This prototype for compressed air spray applicators outclassed old methods. Gone were the days, hopefully, of blowing arsenic-based London purple off of a folded piece of paper. German and Swiss improvements on Riley’s nozzle led to the modern knapsack sprayers of the 1950s.

  13  Try saying that five times fast.

  14  Bruce Tabashnik e-mailed me a mobile phone video of what an infestation looks like. Colleagues in Gujarat, India, used the same Bt crops but didn’t have the resources to properly implement them. Within 10 years the worms had adapted. The 51-second clip opens on mounds of frost-like hills of harvested cotton. It pans to a noisy cotton gin with fresh bolls hailing down. Above that is a detritus pan and, inside, a squirming pool of rosé-colored worms.

  15  Aside from being the thunder god, Zeus was known as the Fly-Catcher. Apollo was also a go-to for fighting locusts. Seventh-century Muslims wrote and folded their prayers onto poles in the field to keep that swarming pest at bay. Same goes for one seventh-century German abbot utilizing the power of prayer and the staff of St. Columba.

  Six

    1  For example, insects can reduce the frequency of wildfires. Two researchers noticed that from 1970 to 1995 spruce budworm outbreaks in British Columbia “significantly decreased risk of forest fire” for seven-year periods. It is questionable, however, how much of a long-term benefit such outbreaks are for ecosystems.

    2  Clingy moths reside on three-toed sloths, waiting to slurp on their weekly dung droppings, and scarab beetles solicit around wallaby anuses.

    3  Researchers at Lund University found dung balls to be “thermal refuge(s)” by using infrared thermography. Savanna surfaces can surpass temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes lugging dung around a fatiguing sport. To cool their hot feet, beetles rest atop the shit “platform,” decreasing their temperatures by 12 degrees within a matter of seconds. Because fresh dung balls are about 90 percent water, once the beetles are back on the sand, the dung tracks soothe them as well. The Swedish researchers went further by fitting silicone booties on beetles, which resulted in them taking fewer breaks.

    4  Whom police respectfully nicknamed “the Maggotologist.”

    5  Before Raid’s advent, the first civilizations were overrun with flies. Amassed garbage and dead bodies drew “legions” of them, writes entomologist Bernard Greenberg, ingraining their cultural presence early through depictions on ancient Mesopotamian cylindrical seals. A passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh notes, “The gods of strong-walled Uruk are changed into flies and buzz around the streets.” Deceased Egyptians wore “burial beads” to slow their decomposition. Associations to the dead peaked famously with pagan god Beelzebub, originally written in Philistine text as “Ba’al Zebub,” which translates to “Lord of the Flies.”

    6  Oodles better than having bugs up your keister while you’re still alive. “Scaphism” is an ancient torture method in which victims are bound and fed milk and honey. The onslaught of diarrhea attracts the same carrion flies. Maggots amass in the anus—never mind the bee attacks. Soon after, gangrene spreads, as does your internal bug infestation. Yeah. Please leave the night-light on.

    7  Neurotically. I later learn the ground they can cover, at best, is 15 centimeters. So, no Olympic medals for the long jump any time soon.

    8  North American Forensic Entomology Association, that is.

    9  No blood and urine required! In the late 1980s, maggots collected from a 67-day-old cadaver—“brain and testicles not found”—were washed and homogenized and analyzed through a liquid chromatographic procedure for a postmortem drug test. Whether or not the maggots experienced a drug-addled daze is unknown.

  Seven

    1  Unless your name is Louis Armstrong. To prevent his voice from getting too gravelly at a young age, Satchmo ate cockroach soup. Sound hokey? Consider the ground cockroach paste used as a “miracle drug” in Chinese hospitals. “They can cure a number of ailments,” Professor Liu Yusheng told a British news reporter. “And they work much faster than other medicine.”

    2  English naturalist John Ray remarks on this “Acid Juyce” in a January 13, 1670, letter to the publication Philosophical Transactions. He notes how remarkable the extract is: “I doubt not but this liquor may be of singular use in Medicine. Mr. Fisher hath assured me, that himself hath made trial thereof in some diseases with very good successes.”

    3  In fact, mead—a delicious, honey-fermented alcohol—used as an ancient potion, carries some interesting etymological ties. “[Mead] is the basis for the word ‘medicine,’” writes entomologist James Hogue, “in recognition of its purported healing properties.”

    4  The main property in the sexual arousal tincture known as Spanish fly. The infamous aphrodisiac—derived from blister beetles—has a centuries-long history and is used to this day. One case
in 1996 involved a group of Philadelphians admitted into the emergency room hours after consuming Spanish fly–spiked drinks. The compound caused urinary tract hemorrhaging and bleeding, as opposed to the sexytime they’d hoped for.

    5  Leeches—praised for their anticoagulant saliva—first appear in Egyptian hieroglyphs dating to 1567 BCE, and earned the name Hirudo medicinalis in the Roman Empire, and were used cosmetically—almost to the point of extinction—by Victorian women, who stored them in lavish fine-grained marble jars. Back then the hype was known as “leechmania.”

    6  Andy Warhol, during a 1980 dinner party conversation with William Burroughs, is quoted as saying: “I used to come home and I used to be so glad to find a little roach there to talk to … They’re great. I couldn’t step on them.” My sentiments exactly, Mr. Warhol.

    7  Taken from Evening Sun columnist Don Marquis’s fictional character from 1916 in Archy and Mehitabel. The satiric column asserts that one morning he “discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the [typewriter] keys” with verses expressing the woes of the everyday bug: