[Animals] Bed bugs are everywhere and they are good at what they do

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Bed bugs are everywhere and they are good at what they do

These parasites have spread to almost all cities in the world and, although they can be annoying, their risks to people's health are limited.

Fashion designers and celebrities from various industries recently gathered in Paris for Fashion Week, but they weren't the only ones making headlines. Videos of bedbugs crawling through the city's padded crevices, from subway seats to movie theater recliners, flooded social media and news channels.

The insects have fueled widespread concern in Paris, France, and the rest of the world because of the number of travelers in the city who could return home with a bloodsucking hitchhiker in tow. "No one is safe," tweeted the first deputy mayor of Paris during Fashion Week (September 25 - October 3).

Although bed bugs can be annoying, these insects do not spread disease and are generally more of an itchy nuisance than a serious threat to your health. They were largely absent from the 1940s until the late 1990s due to pesticide use, but have re-emerged in recent years, exploding in almost every major city, from New York (United States) and Hong Kong ( China). The situation in Paris may not be an outbreak at all, but rather evidence of a long-standing problem, and an example of what makes these creatures so effective.

"I'm guessing they've had a bed bug problem for a long time," says Zachary DeVries, an urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky. "It's not like it showed up during Fashion Week. Someone just happened to see it and it caught their eye... right place, right time, or in his case, probably wrong place, wrong time."

Anyone who has experienced a bed bug infestation in their own home knows that the bites of these insects can cause uncomfortable, itchy welts. People probably also know how difficult it is to eliminate bed bugs once they get in, nesting inside the fabrics and cushions of furniture.

An individual bed bug usually only lives a few months or, in some cases, up to a year. But that's enough time for a po[CENSORED]tion to explode, according to DeVries.

"You could leave a single female in your house that has been mated and, very quickly, it can start a po[CENSORED]tion that can grow out of control in a matter of weeks or months," he says.

(Related: How to effectively avoid insect bites in summer)

What are bed bugs?
  Bed bugs are part of a family of insects called Cimicidae, which includes about 100 species of small parasitic insects that feed on warm-blooded animals. Only three of these species typically bite humans, the most common of which is known as Cimex lectularius.

Adult bed bugs are reddish brown, wingless and about 6 millimeters long, about the size of an apple seed. They are often confused with other blood suckers, such as fleas, but can be differentiated by their flat, oval bodies.

"Bed bugs have been a problem for as long as we've had records," DeVries says. Their tiny remains have even been found in Egyptian tombs dating back more than 3,500 years. But where did they come from in the first place? Scientists are still unsure of the early ancestors of bed bugs, but one of the leading theories about the emergence of modern bed bugs is that they evolved in association with bats.

"About 200,000 years ago, when humans cohabited in caves with bats, a lineage of bed bugs associated with humans," says Coby Schal, an urban entomologist at North Carolina State University in the United States. "However, as humans left the cave, that lineage followed them."

(Related: Some of us are a magnet for mosquitoes, so you can avoid being one)

Feeding a pest
Every few months for more than 35 years, Lou Sorkin has practiced the same ritual: He sits at his kitchen counter, drinks a cup of coffee, and feeds his bedbugs. Sorkin, an entomologist living in New York, has bred and studied these creatures throughout his career, letting more than 200,000 bedbugs eat on his arm over the past few decades, according to estimates. of the.

"It's not a big deal because I don't react badly to them feeding on me," says Sorkin, who now works at a consulting company that helps people identify and treat pests in their homes.

Before each meal, Sorkin first exhales into the glass containers that hold the bedbugs behind a thin screen. Unlike cockroaches, bed bugs are not interested in sandwich crumbs or dirty dishes; Instead, they are attracted to the carbon dioxide in your breath, your body heat, and your scent, including the smell of your dirty clothes, according to a 2017 study.

Once a bed bug finds its target, the insect punctures a needle-like tube that is connected to its head into the skin to suck out the warm blood. It also injects a burst of proteins into the sting site, including a numbing agent and an anticoagulant to prevent blood from clotting.

During a feeding, bed bugs can drink six times their weight in blood, often resembling "a Christmas ornament" when satiated, according to Schal. Although bed bugs are not known to carry disease, their saliva can induce an allergic response in some people, resulting in large, itchy bumps. By contrast, other people may not even realize they are living with bed bugs because their skin has no reaction, Schal says.

(Related: How to protect yourself from ticks?)

Parasite proliferation
Through a strategy known as traumatic insemination, an adult male bed bug will puncture a female's abdomen with her sickle-shaped penis and inject her sperm directly into her body to mate. The sperm passes through the female's open circulatory system to her ovaries, where the egg is fertilized.

"The female has a fully functional genital tract that the male chooses to ignore and stab in the side anyway," says William Hentley, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. "How she evolved is a mystery, to be honest."

Over time, female bed bugs have developed a specialized organ in their abdomen known as the spermatid that is packed with immune cells, helping to prevent bacterial infections at the wound site. After this violent co[CENSORED]tion, the female usually lays one to seven eggs per day, which hatch into nymphs. These nymphs go through five different stages of molting and growth, known as instars, before reaching adulthood, although they must consume a blood meal before completing each molt.

Common bedfellows
Throughout history, humans have made countless attempts to control bed bug outbreaks. One of the most successful efforts was during World War II, when the now-banned pesticide DDT was widely distributed to kill insects. At first, this chemical was exceptional at reducing bed bug outbreaks. In the 1990s, a new po[CENSORED]tion of bed bugs immune to the potent effects of DDT began to spread.

"This is the problem with pesticides because as soon as you start killing a lot of bugs, but leaving a few, the po[CENSORED]tion quickly develops resistance," says DeVries, adding that this is similar to diseases developing resistance to antibiotics in the medical world.

Compounding the problem, global travel has proliferated in recent decades, making it possible for bed bugs to spread around the world and find new hosts every day. As a result, bed bug po[CENSORED]tions have grown quite a bit in this time, and many of the insects are now highly resistant to many of the pesticides on the market. Exterminators often rely on heat treatments because bed bugs die if exposed to temperatures above about 43 degrees Celsius for 90 minutes or more.

"The best way to not get bed bugs is to buy a cabin in the woods, hide there and never come out, but then you miss out on all the enjoyment and pleasures of life," DeVries says. "Don't carry the paranoia with you. It's not going to help you, and at the end of the day, they're just bugs and right now we can control them and deal with them."

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/video/tv/estos-macacos-podrian-ser-la-especie-mas-compasiva-de-la-tierra