by Amy Stewart
The larvae in particular are voracious consumers of old, damp buildings; in fact, Oxford’s famous Bodleian Library recently required a new roof in order to save its decorated ceiling from the destruction brought down upon it by the appetite of these creatures. Many a homeowner has found the rafters turned to powder after decades of quiet chewing by this destructive pest.
But the beetle’s morbid song is hardly its worst quality. These dull, gray-brown beetles bore through moist wood, creating tiny entry and exit holes packed with the powdery residue they leave behind. They prefer hardwood timbers that have already been colonized by fungus, which explains why magnificent old oak buildings in England hold so much appeal. Death-watch beetles can also be found in books and heavy antique furniture. Under the most advantageous circumstances they may live for five to seven years, undermining homes, cathedrals, and libraries, as well as driving insomniacs crazy.
An entomologist writing for Harper’s magazine in 1861 may have said it best when she described a trip to visit a friend in the country. “The first night I fancied I should have gone mad before morning,” she said. “The walls of the bed-room were papered, and from them beat, as it were, a thousand watches — tick, tick, tick . . . But at last the welcome morning dawned, and early I was down in the library; even here every book, on shelf above shelf, was riotous with tick, tick, tick . . . The house was a huge clock, with thousands of pendulums ticking from morning till night. I was careful not to allow my great discomfort to annoy others. I argued, what they could tolerate, surely I could; and in a few days habit had rendered the fearful, dreaded ticking a positive necessity.”
Meet the Relatives The cigarette beetle, Lasioderma serricorne, the drugstore beetle, Stegobium paniceum, and other pests of furniture, books, and stored food are related to the death-watch beetle.
DESTRUCTIVE
BOOKWORMS
Through and through th’ inspir’d leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings;
But O respect his lordship’s taste,
And spare his golden bindings.
Robert Burns wrote those lines in a poem called “The Bookworms,” but in fact, there is no such thing as a worm that eats books. Even in the dampest and moldiest of libraries, the pages of a book would be far too dry to meet the needs of a moist creature like a worm. Instead, the insects most injurious to books tend to be those species of lice, beetles, moths, roaches, and other scavengers that are attracted to the surprisingly nutritious ingredients found on bookshelves.
What a glorious buffet a book can be! Consider all the natural ingredients used to print and bind a book: paper made of cotton, rice, hemp, or pulped wood; covers of animal skin, wood, and silk fabric; bindings of paste and glue and thread. Rare old volumes printed on vellum — a kind of parchment made from animal skin — are particularly tempting to necrophagous, or corpse-eating, insects.
Over the years, various noxious substances have been employed to rid books of bugs, including wood creosote, cedar oil, citrus leaves, hydrocyanic acid gas (a cyanide gas that was used by Nazis in concentration camps), carbolic acid (also used in concentration camps and as an embalming fluid), and mercury chloride, a highly poisonous form of mercury. Today some libraries use a deep freeze method to thoroughly rid their collections of pests without leaving a chemical residue behind.
But the best suggestion comes from Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist writing in about 160 AD, who criticized “the ignorant book collector” at length, charging that anyone who amassed books to show off their wealth rather than to read them deserved a plague of bugs: “What else is he doing but buying haunts for mice and lodgings for worms?” Desiderius Erasmus, the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Dutch humanist, echoed that thought when he wrote that “books, to be saved from the worms, must be used.”
BOOK LOUSE
Trogiumpulsatorium, others
The creature most often blamed for damage to books is the book louse. Its name is misleading — real lice feed on warm-blooded creatures, not literature — and it does not actually eat paper. Instead, this pale, nearly invisible insect is attracted to the mold and fungus that flourishes in poorly maintained libraries. As it eats, pages do experience some collateral damage, but the real significance of a book lice infestation is the fact that the books have been allowed to mold and rot.
LARDER BEETLE
Dermestes lardarius
This beetle, along with other members of the family known as skin beetles, can be found scavenging corpses for bits of dried skin or raiding pantries in search of ham, bacon, and other smoked meats. In museums they cause serious damage to preserved insect collections, buffalo hides, and taxidermied birds, but some curators have turned the beetles to their advantage. A cousin of the larder beetle called the leather beetle, or Dermestes vulpinus, has found gainful employment at museums cleaning carcasses so skeletons can be put on display. One curator at Chicago’s Field Museum cheerfully reported that a hungry bunch of leather beetles can strip a dead mouse down to the bone in a matter of hours, while a raccoon corpse might take a week or so. “We give them a free meal and they give us a clean skeleton,” he said.
In libraries, these carnivores chew holes in leather bindings and lay eggs inside the spine, or even between the covers of two leather-bound books standing next to each other on the shelf. After about six days the eggs hatch and the larvae tunnel right into the pages of a book to create a safe, quiet haven for their pupation. These tunnels do resemble worm-holes, which might explain the origin of the term “bookworm.”
SILVERFISH
Lepisma saccharina
The English naturalist Robert Hooke, writing in the seventeenth century, called the silverfish “one of the teeth of Time” for the way it wears at antiquities. He said that this greasy, inch-long wingless insect was “much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes thro’ the leaves and covers.” Silverfish actually feed on carbohydrates: the sugars and starches found in everything from glue to paper to fabrics. They also happen to like the taste of shampoos, soaps, and shaving creams, which is why they so often inhabit bathrooms.
DRUGSTORE BEETLE
Stegobium paniceum
Entomologists call this a “cosmopolitan species” because of its wide-ranging and sophisticated preferences — it enjoys books and leather, antique furniture, chocolates, spices, and prescription medications, including opium. A tiny reddish beetle not much larger than a flea, this reviled creature is an enemy of rare book rooms, museums, and pharmacies. It once infested the Huntington Library in Southern California, requiring truckloads of books to be placed into a vacuum fumigator and gassed with a mixture of ethylene oxide and carbon dioxide, killing even its tiny eggs.
BOOK SCORPION
Chelifer cancroides
In about 343 BC Aristotle wrote in his Historia Animaliun: “In books also other animalcules are found, some resembling the grubs found in garments, and some resembling tailless scorpions, but very small.” He was probably referring to the book scorpion, a strange little arachnid that is not a true scorpion, but does possess a pair of fierce-looking pinchers that resemble those of a scorpion or a lobster. The creature is barely a quarter of an inch long, and while it can be quite alarming to find one between the pages of a book, it actually feeds on book lice, moth larva, beetles, and other insects that pose a far greater threat to literary collections than it does.
FURNITURE BEETLE
Anobium punctatum
Any enemy to bookshelves is an enemy to books. This wood-boring beetle does its damage in the larval stage. While these larvae might survive only a season in the outdoors, given a nice, quiet library, they will flourish for two or three years, munching through bookshelves, and taking time to browse bookbindings in search of cardboard or wood boards. Once they’ve grown fat and strong off some book lover’s collection, they’ll build a pupal chamber for themselves and emerge six weeks later as a full-grown adult — less than a quarter-inch lo
ng, but ready to mate, lay eggs, and continue the cycle. The Jewish National and University Library in Israel discovered the beetles in its collection in 2004, but fortunately their archive of Albert Einstein’s letters and papers was spared.
“Books, to be saved from the worms, must be used.”
DANGEROUS
Deer Tick
IXODES SCAPULARIS
Polly Murray knew that something was seriously wrong with her family. Starting with her first pregnancy in the late 1950s, she suffered from strange, unexplained symptoms: painful body aches and fatigue, bizarre rashes, headaches, joint pain, fevers — a catalog of symptoms so long and perplexing that she took to bringing a list of them to every doctor appointment. Over the years her husband and three children experienced similar problems. At times it seemed like everyone in the house was either on antibiotics, propped up in bed with joint pain, or awaiting yet another round of test results.
SIZE:
2 mm (nymphs are smaller — about the size of a flake of pepper)
FAMILY:
Ixodoidea
HABITAT:
Woods and forests
DISTRIBUTION:
East Coast, found as far south as Florida and as far west as Minnesota, Iowa, and Texas. Ixodes pacificus is found in Washington, Oregon, and California, with limited distribution in neighboring states.
The doctors in her hometown of Lyme, Connecticut, never had any answers; her family tested negative for everything from lupus to seasonal allergies. From a clinical standpoint, there was nothing wrong with them. A few doctors recommended psychiatric treatment, and some offered penicillin or aspirin. There was nothing else they could do.
In 1975, everything changed. Armed with the knowledge that a few of her neighbors had similar problems and that several local children had been diagnosed with an extremely rare juvenile form of rheumatoid arthritis, Murray called an epidemiologist at the state health department. He took down the information but offered no solutions.
A month later, she met a young doctor named Allen Steere. He’d worked briefly at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and was looking for a research project for his postdoctoral fellowship. Connecticut’s state epidemiologist had called to tell him about the cluster of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis cases in Lyme. Steere listened to Murray’s entire story and began an investigation that led to the discovery of a previously unknown tick-transmitted disease. Although the civic leaders in Murray’s hometown were not thrilled by the idea of having a dreadful malady named after their town, the scientists called it Lyme disease, and the name stuck.
Although civic leaders were not thrilled by the idea of having a dreadful malady named after their town, the scientists called it Lyme disease, and the name stuck.
The deer tick, also called the blacklegged tick, lives in heavily populated areas along the East Coast and is responsible for most of the cases of Lyme disease in this country. Its ability to transmit the disease depends in part upon its curious life cycle, which can involve three different hosts as it matures. When the larvae first emerge from eggs in the fall, they feed upon rats, mice, or birds. They overwinter on the forest floor, and in the spring they molt into nymphs and feed again — this time on small rodents or humans. By late summer the nymphs have become adults that feed on large animals, primarily deer, for the last year or so of their lives.
These tick larvae sometimes take the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, a spirochete called Borrelia burgdorferi, into their bodies during their first meal. When that happens, they are capable of transmitting the bacteria the next time they feed. In spite of the name “deer tick,” the deer themselves don’t become infected with Lyme disease. But they do help move the ticks around and bring tick populations into close contact with humans. People who live in tick-infested areas know to watch for the telltale bulls-eye rash, called erythema migrans, that often occurs at the site of an infected tick bite within the first month of infection.
Lyme disease is nothing new. Medical writings dating back as far as 1550 BC referred to “tick fever,” and European doctors had been investigating symptoms similar to those caused by Lyme disease throughout the nineteenth century. (In Europe the disease is transmitted by the tick Ixodes ricinus, called the castor bean tick for its resemblance to the poisonous seed.) In fact, physicians in Lyme who had been practicing medicine for several decades recalled treating patients in the 1920s and 1930s who had similar symptoms. Today it is the most frequently reported vector-borne illness in the United States, with twenty-five to thirty thousand new infections reported each year.
Meet the Relatives There are roughly nine hundred species of ticks found worldwide.
DANGEROUS
Filth Fly
MUSCA SORBENS
New Yorkers know Randall’s Island as an oasis in the East River dedicated to sporting events, bike trails, and walking paths with breathtaking views of the city. Little League teams play baseball, Olympic athletes train, and rock bands play outdoor concerts in the summer. Accessible from 103rd Street, the island offers convenient sports programs for kids in Harlem and the Bronx.
SIZE:
6–8 mm
FAMILY:
Muscidae
HABITAT:
Decaying organic matter, including sewage, garbage, dead animals, and other waste
DISTRIBUTION:
Found in warmer climates worldwide, particularly in areas of human habitation
But the island wasn’t always such a desirable place for children to play. It served as a “house of refuge” for juvenile delinquents from 1854 until it was closed in 1935. Children detained there were put to work making hoopskirts, shoes, chair frames, sieves, and rattraps. The girls did cooking, housework, and laundry, and made all the uniforms for the inmates. A half hour to an hour per day was devoted to schooling. Punishments for bad behavior included being sent to bed without supper, a bread-and-water diet, solitary confinement, and beatings. Although the children slept in cells, administrators in 1860 thought it might be better to house them in hammocks in open rooms, where constant monitoring could prevent “indulgence in solitary vice.”
The children did not enjoy this treatment. They responded with outbreaks of violence against the staff and attempts to jump into the East River and swim away. The situation got particularly bad in 1897, when an inspection revealed a sewage system that emitted “offensive odors” and an outbreak of a terrible eye disease called trachoma. Roughly 10 percent of the inmates were infected every year. At the time, the connection between these two problems might not have been clear — but it is now.
Trachoma was once a common illness in the United States. It was frequently seen among immigrants attempting to enter through Ellis Island. It is now almost unheard of in wealthy countries, but is all too common in areas of extreme poverty, refugee camps, and prisons throughout the world.
The bacteria that causes trachoma, Chlamydia trachomatis, triggers an inflammation of the upper eyelid, which can lead to a cycle of swelling and scarring that shortens the inner lining, eventually pulling the eyelashes into the eye itself. This incredibly painful condition, called trichiasis, leads to damage to the cornea and vision problems. If left untreated, a person can go blind.
Right now, eighty-four million people are infected with the disease, and eight million are losing their sight. It is found in parts of Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. While antibiotics can treat the infection, and a corneal transplant can treat vision impairments, these are often not available in poorer countries. The disease is particularly debilitating for women, who cannot cook over a fire or work in the fields with this condition. Thus, women depend on children — usually girls — to stay home and help them rather than go to school. In some cases, women are abandoned by their husbands.
While the disease can be spread through close contact, especially between mother and child, health officials also lay the blame squarely on Musca sorbens, a relative to the common housefly that
has earned the unflattering name “filth fly” for its habit of swarming around latrines, garbage, and manure piles, then picking up bacteria on its hairy legs and moving it around.
Soldiers in Vietnam reported that the flies were so thick in the mess halls that it was impossible not to eat a few of them with their meals.
Basic sanitation, such as hand-washing and the use of clean cloths to wash children’s faces, can check the spread of the disease, but eliminating the ubiquitous filth fly is a bigger battle. In areas with open latrines and garbage piles, the flies are so thick that people quickly give up on swatting them away and spend their days with flies climbing in and out of their noses, mouths, and eyes. Soldiers in Vietnam reported that the flies were so thick in the mess halls that it was impossible not to eat a few of them with their meals.
The solution lies in the construction of latrines designed to keep flies out. One design, called a ventilated improved pit latrine, or VIP, is seen by public health organizations as one of the best approaches to keeping the filth fly out of people’s lives. It features a vent pipe covered with a screen to keep flies out. The vent also catches wind currents and uses them for circulation, lifting odors away. A representative of Jimmy Carter’s foundation, the Carter Center, recently announced that the foundation had hoped to install ten thousand VIPs in Ethiopia, but villagers were so taken with the idea that they installed ninety thousand. Looking back to Carter’s childhood, the spokesman said, “They look just like the outhouses people in Georgia were using 50 years ago.”