Dark Banquet (21 page)

As I rotated the canning jar in my hand, I couldn't help noticing that Lou's bed bugs were in a frenzy.

“They're attracted to your body heat and the carbon dioxide in your breath,” Lou said.

Within the crowded glass confines, the bed bugs had responded to stimulatory cues in much the same way as the leeches did when hunting Bogie's character in
The African Queen.
In this case, however, the thermoreceptors and chemoreceptors responsible for prey detection were stimulated by increases in temperature and carbon dioxide concentration (rather than touch, from the incoming waves of disturbed water, or vision, from changes in light intensity). At a basic level, though, the wiring of the bed bug and leech nervous systems, and their function, is quite similar. A stimulus is detected that prompts signals (afferent nerve impulses) to be sent from sensory receptors to the body's data processing center (the brain). After rapidly sorting through incoming information (like direction of prey and distance), a response is generated that takes the form of outgoing (efferent) nerve impulses. These are sent to the muscles of locomotion. Activation of these muscles and their subsequent contraction leads to coordinated movement of the leech or bed bug's body (either swimming or running toward its respective prey). In both instances, if the initial stimulus had been interpreted by the brain as DANGER, rather than FOOD, the outgoing response would have resulted in defensive behavior–like fleeing.

This is certainly a simplification, but on one level the only difference between the nervous systems of leeches, bed bugs, and humans is that we have
many
more neurons, packed into specialized regions of the brain (like our wrinkly cerebral hemispheres). This complex and intricately interconnected wiring allows us to do things that the relatively simplified nervous systems of the leech or bed bug cannot achieve—such as deciding whether to respond to a stimulus in the first place or choosing to vary that response. In the previously mentioned blood feeders, fewer neurons lead to limited or even one stereotypical response to each stimulus encountered. For example, bed bugs are thought to release an aggregation pheromone, a chemical that initiates clustering behavior in members of the same species (conspecifics).
^*94
In this case, think of a trio of bed bugs that have just hopped off someone's luggage. After scurrying across the floor for a few seconds, one of them encounters a wall and follows it, eventually finding a crack in the molding large enough to slip through. Stimulated by physical contact with the walls of this dark, safe haven (hereafter referred to as a harborage), the bed bug releases a pheromone whose message is interpreted by the other two bed bugs as something very much like SAFEDARK.

Initially released in response to a stimulus, the pheromone itself becomes a stimulus, triggering a highly specific response. Soon enough, the harborage has three bed bugs in it. Killing time while they await a meal, the bugs behave predictably, making more little bed bugs and producing copious piles of bloody feces.
^*95

The point is that once pheromones are sensed, there's no choice and little behavioral variation in the response. These chemical messages are also a major key to the seemingly bewildering degree of organization exhibited by social insects like ants, termites, and bees.

Although Lou's bed bug colony was a far cry from a beehive, the single-mindedness of their quest for blood was chilling to watch.

“Imagine having this many bed bugs living in your apartment—living behind your headboard, in your mattress, hiding behind your switch plates.”

“And all of them just waiting for the lights to go out,” I chimed in. Admittedly, I was starting to buy into Sorkin's ghoulish gig.

“Exactly,” Lou said. I noticed that there was nothing that could be interpreted as disgust in his voice, and I wondered how many people this soft-spoken bug-meister had sent home to a night of the creepy-crawlies after they'd checked out his colony.

He went on. “And the more cluttered your home is, the better.”

I shot a quick glance around Lou's office. “So what you're saying is that I should not drop this bottle.”

“No…that would be a bad thing,” the bug expert replied.

I passed the jar back to the researcher, but instead of placing it back on his desk, he did something peculiar. He brought the lid of the jar up to his nose and inhaled (rather deeply, I thought).

“Some people say they smell like fresh raspberries or cilantro.” He held the bottle toward me.

I took a small sniff.

“Hmmmm,” I said, not smelling much of anything.

“I always thought they smelled like citronella,” Lou continued. “Nowhere near as strong as those yellow citronella ants, but there's a definite similarity.”

I leaned over and took a somewhat larger hit, checking first to make certain we hadn't inhaled a hole in the mesh. They
did
smell like citronella.

The scientist motioned to my note pad. “This is important,” he said. “There are Web sites and articles out there reporting that bed bugs don't have a smell. That's untrue—
especially
when they get riled up.”

I nodded, as I took some notes. Strangely, rather than the smell of bed bugs or their lack of smell, I'd been struck by the idea that someone other than myself had actually sniffed those citronella ants. Each summer when I was a kid, the quarter-inch-long insects would swarm within the sidewalk cracks in front of my house. They had a distinctive odor, and as soon as I caught wind of it, I'd break out my action figures and start fishing for ants with a piece of straw. The enraged ants would emerge, a dozen or so at a time, clamped by their powerful jaws to the NEST THREAT that appeared like clockwork each year to poke at the entrance to their colony. And just like Lou's bed bugs, the angrier the citronella ants became, the stronger the scent they produced.

The entomologist's voice jerked me back into the present. “In all likelihood, bed bugs release many different pheromones.”

Besides chemical messages like the aggression pheromone produced by the citronella ants I'd hassled as a kid, other substances released by the bed bugs functioned to make them less palatable to predators.
^*96

“Humans can only discern one of these pheromones,” Lou continued, placing his colony down on the table. “Dogs, on the other hand, have a much more sensitive sense of smell, and some are actually being trained to detect bed bug infestations.”
^*97

At a lecture sponsored by the New York Entomological Society, several nights later, I learned that researchers were working to identify the bed bugs' aggregational pheromone—the chemical signal that would lead to the formation of loose groups by the bed bugs as they gathered in their nooks and crannies between meals. By isolating the specific chemical that caused bed bugs to aggregate, scientists hoped to learn more about this behavior—information that could be used to develop more effective eradication methods.

There were around seventy-five people present in the audience that night and they seemed to be a mix of pest-control types (there to pick up half a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation credit for their attendance) and city dwellers, either interested in bed bugs or traumatized by them to various degrees of twitchiness.

The lecture was titled “Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't Let the
Cimex lectularius
Bite,” and the first speaker was Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, a former doctoral student in entomology at Cornell and currently working for New York State's Integrated Pest Management program. Together with her cospeaker, Gil Bloom (a faculty member at the City University of New York), she had been tracking the current outbreak of bed bugs in New York City since early 2001.

According to Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann, bed bugs originally lived in caves and fed on bats. Once humans (and other mammals) began inhabiting these caves, the opportunistic parasites began to feed on them as well. At a certain point, some bed bugs became associated rather exclusively with humans.
^*98

The first literary reference to bed bugs can be found in Aristophanes' play
The Clouds
(423 BCE). A century later, in
Historia Animalium,
Aristotle assured readers that “bugs are generated from the moisture of living animals, as it dries outside their bodies.”

Monograph of Cimicidae,
by Robert Usinger, is the closest thing to a bed bug bible. In his book, Usinger describes how bed bugs were not only present in Greece by 400 BCE but that the Greek physician Dioscorides was advising patients to
eat them.
For example, a recipe that called for mixing seven wall lice with meat and beans was used as a treatment for malaria. By “holding the beans,” one could counteract the venom of certain snakes.
^†99
For those who preferred to take their ectoparasites with a chaser, Dioscorides also prescribed downing the bugs with wine or vinegar as means of expelling horse leeches (presumably from a patient's throat). Additionally, difficult or painful urination (a condition called dysuria) was treated by mashing up some of the insects and inserting them into the stricken orifice. Even
sniffing
them (the bed bugs, that is) could revitalize a woman who had fallen into a swoon from “strangulation of the vulva.”

Medicinal uses for bed bugs, most of them cribbed from the ancient Greeks, were described in 77 CE by the Roman Gaius Plinius Secundus (better known in modern times as Pliny the Elder).
^*100

Quintus Serenus was another Roman savant and the author of an early medical text. Here, the author clearly demonstrates how his savant status had been attained in fields other than poetry writing:

Shame not to drink thee Wall-lice mixt with wine,

And Garlik bruised together at noon-day.

Moreover a bruis'd Wall-louse with an egge, repine

Not for to take, 'tis loathsome, yet full good I say.

Serenus does fare slightly better in this next description of an alternative Roman thirst quencher (actually cracking several Top 100 lists of “poems about consumption of bloodsucking insects”).
^†101

Some men prescribe seven Wall-lice for to drink,

Mingled with water, and one cup they think

Is better than with drowsy death to sink

With no reports on any actual medical benefits derived from eating, drinking, sniffing, or inserting bed bugs, it appears that their medicinal use was yet another instance of treatments that were nearly as bad as the maladies they were meant to alleviate (see chapter 4).

A Treatise of Buggs,
written by John Southall, was the first book devoted completely to bed bugs. Published in 1730, it offers readers a tantalizing peek at early pest control, as well as some insights into race relations.

During a visit to the West Indies in 1726, the author was puzzled after encountering “an uncommon negro” with hair, breast, and beard “as white as snow.” The old gentleman was also puzzled by
his
encounter with the author, noticing that his “Face and Eyes were much swelled with Bugg-Bites,” and he wondered why “white men should let them bite,” rather than doing “something to kill them, as he did.” Presumably having no good answer for that one, Southall accepted “a Calibash full of Liquor” and directions to apply the stuff around his bedroom. The results would have sent a chill down Lou Sorkin's spine:

The instant I applied it, vast numbers did, (as he told me they would) come out of their Holes, and die before my face.

(John Southall,
A Treatise of Buggs,
8)

After waking up bite-free, the author showed his gratitude by immediately hatching a plot to separate the freed slave (now referred to as “my Negro”) from his secret recipe. Southall broke out the good stuff, enticing the Jamaican with “one piece of beef, some biscuits and a bottle of beer,” after noting how “all Negroes being greedy of Flesh, when they can come at it.” As the day progressed, the brew flowed freely until “all the bottles we emptied of beer were fill'd with liquor.” Southall, however, remained sober enough to make notes about ingredients, quantities, and procedures, and after returning to England he marketed the pesticide along with his services as an early pest-control specialist. Unlike his long-forgotten Jamaican “business partner,” Southall did not divulge the secret ingredients of his elixir—which he christened Nonpareil.
^*102

Southall also endeavored to determine just how bed bugs came to England, and in doing so he shows off his modest side, informing the reader how he overcame “difficulties, which might have discouraged a less enterprising Genius.” The great man consulted “as many learned, curious, and ancient men” as he could find, affirming that before the Great Fire of London in 1666, bed bugs “were never noted to have been seen.”