My Bedbug Story

Took a road trip to Montreal and upstate New York which included a day trip to the Big Apple and so Aidan unpacks his bag and comes up to me with a little bug on a sheet which he had taken on the trip and I agreed with him that it looked something like a deer tick which are common in New York, and they carry Lyme Disease, but when I put on my magnifying goggles and then verified it online, it was Insecta Hemiptera Cimicidae Cimex lectularius Linnaeus: bedbug. The sheet it was on had been unpacked for a little while so to be safe I looked his mattress over carefully and lo I found a little cluster of the bugs, various sizes, in a crease of the box spring near the head. I killed them all with a few steam puffs from a hot iron. They died so easily.

I lived with cockroaches for several years in Seattle and one summer I rented a ground floor apartment in Houston and they were three inches long. I've hated cockroaches and now I hate bedbugs too.

In 1996 Asian Longhorn Beetles -- another insect pest -- arrived in the U.S. in wooden pallets, just to Chicago and not more than a few blocks from my home; these big beetles kill hardwood trees and if left unchecked they would become epidemic. Fortunately Longhorn Beetles can't fly very far so they typically populate in tight clusters, that is, until someone moves some brush or firewood and then another cluster pops up more or less randomly and within 50 miles or so. Those beetles – big and pretty -- were easy to spot, stop, and kill and Chicago did just that with early detection, a prohibition on moving wood, inoculation of surrounding trees, and constant vigilance. They were all gone before I could even get a picture, a fact which I will always regret.

Photographing insects is a hobby of mine, I've been doing it for years. Arthropods are simply marvelous with their spiky jointed legs, brilliant colors and strangely imaginative features -- not to mention their horrific behavior. Anyone with a nice macro lens who's tried it is likely to agree. I once found a Mantispid, a sort of cross between a wasp and praying mantis, and it drew over 300 likes and 40 comments on the Entomology facebook page. Score. So, because I hoped and expected to never see another bedbug ever again, this time -- unlike with the Asian Beetles -- I did not miss my chance. I had already taped it shut, doors and outlets, but I crept into the infested room anyway and carefully pinched one from the bedspread, took it downstairs, flipped it on its back and plunged a pin through its belly. This is exactly the picture I wanted. So, you see, finding a bedbug was not all bad.

Everyone knows New York City has bedbugs but Chicago now has more, and according to a video loop in my hardware store Uptown (about 3 miles south of me) is the geographical apex. Along with Rogers Park. That’s where I live. Come to think of it, the building next to me recently had men in hazard suits going in and out, and lots of mattresses and couches were piled in the alley. No, we didn’t get these bugs from New York, I think we got them from next door. We called New York and Montreal anyway, to warn them, and to apologize. We also called an exterminator.

Adult bedbugs are about the size of an apple seed, and each of the five nymph stages is progressively smaller back to the egg which is still visible, white, like two grains of salt stuck together. With my flip-down jewelers glasses I could even see the little rings around the egg tube, and the hole in the end where one had emerged. The first nymphs are as small as the egg they came from and almost white when they're hungry -- red when they're not. The nymphs shed skin at every stage so there are casings, bugs, and plenty of black specks if you look carefully; the feces are the first and easiest thing to spot. It’s not pretty, but all they eat is blood, so that’s all they defecate as well. Little blood-poops that smear easily.

What I’ve learned about bedbugs is a bit disconcerting; we may be entering an era in which they are “around,” and we have to get used to them, like cockroaches. That's like it was before WWII, I've read, before DDT became a standard consumable. Everyone best be prepared.

And so, what's the deal? These bugs spend most of their time wedged in cracks, folds, or seams. They like porous surfaces and places where head and butt are both touching surfaces. They come out to eat, like once a week. Our friendly exterminator estimated they spend 99% of their time hiding.

The good news is that they are fairly easy to spot, they're predictable, and they don't jump onto pets and spread around the house that way. In fact they stay as close to their food source as possible, in other words by the head of your bed and that's right where I found them. Their droppings are plentiful, hardly discrete, and they smear, of course, blood red. My exterminator explained that not only do they poop blood, they also spit a little anticoagulant into you when they bite so you leak a little too when they're done. Unfortunately they also spit a little anesthetic so you don't even know it's happened till morning, or even for a day or two. They initially congregate at the head of beds but they expand out from there as their colony grows -- toward the foot of the bed and up the walls. It seems the females flee from the males because of what entomologists call “traumatic insemination.” He simply pierces her body and inseminates the whole cavity. Too much of that can kill you. And from our perspective, females fleeing is not not a good thing because by that time they are certainly pregnant.

Eventually I got thinking about how quickly they could spread, and I got out my calculator. Please someone check my math, given the assumptions this is what I get for one, two, four and six months’ worst-case scenario. Given that a female starts laying eggs at the adult stage 6, and each stage takes a week, then at 45 days she starts laying her 4 eggs a day. It takes a week to hatch and the gender ratio is indeed 1:1, as is typical for animals. So let's look only at females – say one pregnant female is in a suitcase you bring home. I’m guessing that like a queen bee she keeps sperm in long term storage so she stays fertilized even on her own. She lays eggs at the rate of about four a day, but we're only concerned with females, so 2(f) a day.  Soon there are a stable 14 female eggs at any time because after one week while two more are laid daily, two hatch. At day 46 there are suddenly 3 adult females as the first two eggs reach maturity, and every day then there are two more adult females and that goes on for six weeks. Each of these adults is impregnated of course, as males are born too, so the number of eggs rises during the next cycle, linearly but at twice the rate of adult females because each has two eggs f every day. But on day 53 the first four grandbabies hatch, along with two more from pioneer mom so that's six new females for a total of 95 -- then ten more on day 54, 14 more girls on day 55, then 18 more, 22 more, 26 more and so on each day, adding four more than had been added the day before.  These are feeding but not yet fertile.

Three months pass and we shift again as the first grandbabies become fecund. So now instead of a gentle exponential growth if you can call x+4f gentle), at 97 days -- three months plus a week for hatching -- it really gets exciting. You can see this in the charts. My take away point: pay attention. You have about 50 days to crush a little colony. In the second 50 days it gets much worse, and if you let it go five months, kiss

your world goodbye; people driving by your house will start scratching.  That's when your neighbors get some. My extermininator described going into an apartment: like a murder scene.  Granted, the graph describes full meals and no premature deaths, but just look at the big numbers on the y axis of the last chart.  Then double it; those are just the females.

It gets just a little worse; pack one away for awhile and the whole thing is delayed again because they can live a long time without eating -- probably seven months to a year, depending on the temperature. And if you import a batch of eggs instead (and unfortunately for us, they are indeed laid in clusters) the whole scenario is delayed a month and a half while those nymphs chew their way to adulthood. We can calculate the chance of at least one male and one female in a batch of eggs. With just two eggs, the chance is an even 50-50 that you'll have at least one of each gender. With five eggs it's a 93.75% probability.

What more? They feed at night and are drawn toward heat, moisture, and still pockets of carbon dioxide (that’s you, sleeping). They don’t like dog and cat fur, thankfully, because their wimpy legs are built for scurrying, not for clawing in like a dog tick does so they don’t immediately migrate around your whole house. On a flat surface they move about as fast as ants, and since they can't climb slippery surfaces your stuff in an open plastic bin is probably safe.

Predictability is apparently their weakness: they stay near the head of your bed if they can because every nymph must eat before molting and they molt five times before they can breed.

My advice: get a pair of jeweler’s flip-down goggles and keep a look-out. You'll see them all -- eggs, nymphs, feces, and casings; they're untidy, near your pillow, and easy to spot. They are supposed to smell like rotten raspberries, almonds, or bad B.O., depending on what you read, but I didn't smell anything. Dogs can be trained to sniff out even a tiny batch, every time. You can purchase hypoallergenic mattress covers that will keep them out (or in) but you have to keep it on for a year to kill any trapped inside.

A lot of people don’t react to the anticoagulant, so if you know someone who swells up with a mosquito bite you might invite them for a sleepover, but don't tell them why -- some will have a dramatic reaction -- big big swelling, and bites that leave permanent scars, especially if you scratch them off, as they're likely to do. They do make bed bug traps which will do the same thing without the itching but hey, the human bug-bait method was recommended by our exterminator so I thought I'd pass it on. Another fun fact: while the little critters just drink blood, they can't actually spread the blood diseases, not yet, I've read.

Heat makes them die faster. At 40 degrees they'll starve in a year, at room temperature it just takes 7 months with no food. At 104 degrees they last 24 hours, at 115 degrees just 60 minutes and at 125d, 60 seconds. When I hit them with steam, that's 212 degrees, they just fell right over. You can buy a "PackTight" which is basically an overpriced canvas box, with a zip top, rack, heater and a probe thermometer so you can tell how hot it is in the middle. It's like cooking a turkey. But be warned, you ruin a lot of stuff at 125 df.

I suppose it doesn't help to know that cockroaches eat bedbugs; so do centipedes and mites, I've read.  Mice, probably do, too, if that's of any use.

Chicago stopped the Asian Longhorn Beetle from spreading, stopped it cold.  But here's why I think that bedbugs are different such that the game is already lost. 1) they're furtive -- mobile only 1% of the time, mainly when you're sleeping. 2) they're hardy. They'll live up to a year without eating. 3) it's a chore to get rid of them. We had to heat all our things to 125 degrees and we've been living a month with our clothes in plastic bags. 4) It's expensive, too. 5) The bites just don’t bother some people much; some won't notice, or won't care. 6) they are transferred unpredictably -- in used furniture, backbacks, cuffs, books -- so you'll find them, well, wherever people go. 7) there's a social stigma that makes the problem more common than people will want to admit. (That's why I wrote this blog. Hey, we got 'em ... and you can too!) 8) the cost of eradication falls on homeowners, not taxpayers, and 9) here's the clincher: the reservoirs are mainly behind closed doors, and on private property.

Any epidemiologist will tell you that all you need is an R0 greater than one -- more infestations than eradications, and bedbugs are here to stay. I'm guessing it'll be more like 3:1. Or 5:1.  It's over.

So back to my personal story: We caught ours real early this time, thank goodness, and as it turned out I probably killed almost all of them with my iron -- it's all over but the phantom itching. And there's that one great thing I keep coming back to.

I got my picture.

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Update: There may be hope for Chicago after all.  The City passed a Bed Bug Ordinance which goes into effect December 2013.  In any rental unit where infestation is found or suspected, the landlord must hire an exterminator until the bugs are gone.  Not only that, they must  also inspect the two adjacent units left and right as well as those above and below and treat them too, if necessary.  And if so, the peripheral inspection continues until all adjacent bugs are killed.  Landlords cant rent an infected unit and have to inform all new tenants on how to detect and treat bed bugs.  Anything infected has to be wrapped in plastic before going into the dumpster.  Second hand bedding has to be labeled as such.  All the paperwork for all of this has to be made available to City inspectors. 

Tenants will have legal responsibility too.  Here, excerpted from my alderman's summary of the bill: "A tenant shall notify the landlord in writing of any known or suspected bed bug infestation in the building, or any recurring or unexplained bites stings, irritation, or sores of the skin or body which the tenant suspects is caused by bed bugs." 

Tenants not only have to cooperate in the reporting and treatment -- by law -- there is one last sentence that may be the final screw.  "Any person who is found in violation of this article shall be fined not less than $300.00 nor more than $1.000.00 for each offense. Each day that a violation continues shall constitute a separate and distinct offense to which a separate fine shall apply."

Right on!  Start issuing fines, to tenants too -- and it just might work.

Brain Bugs: a book review

When Dean Buonomano named his book Brain Bugs he associated the human mind with computer glitches, an unfortunate irony because one of the first points of the book was how different real thinking is from computation.  The subtitle is “How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives;" this book is an excellent companion to Dan Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and Steve Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought.  

I was once tricked briefly by a robotic “salesperson” on my home phone.  I thought I was talking to a human being but it was just a clever recording with pauses.  And who hasn’t been playful with the iphone’s Siri?  But while people can be nearly tricked into thinking a computer is human, the opposite is far from true.  It’s embarrassing how easy it would be to write a test to determine if something were truly a computer -- just ask me what 18 is raised to the power of 12.  Computers are excellent at digital calculation where we – through evolution – are masters at recognizing patterns; our brilliance is sensing the whole from the parts.  As Buonomano puts it, the organic brain is like a new computer containing both hardware and an operating system.  We’re all wired with the same drives and emotions. But since our bodies had to survive in a shifting environment the operating system emphasized the ability to learn.  “The result is not a fixed balance, but a set of rules that allowed nurture to modulate our nature.” (p 15)

The book’s core question is this: “to what extent is the neural operating system established by evolution well-tuned for the digital, predator-free, sugar-abundant, special effects-filled, antiobiotic-laden, media saturated, densely populated world we have managed to build for ourselves.”  The answer is “Not very well.”   We have false memories, weak numerical skills, a distorted sense of time, large blind spots, we are predisposed to certain fears, our opinions are easily manipulated and we are inclined to be satisfied with supernatural explanations. We can thank our genes for that, genes groomed when our world was very different -- and so were we;  most of the time we were a different species altogether.

When it’s supported with research (and this book is quite well footnoted), I really like a simple explanation with reach: one that explains a lot of things.  The mind, he said, is basically comprised of a network of associations.  When I think “dog” I easily recall my dog, cats, dogfood, doghair, the beach,, the vacuum, my first dog, her vet, my youth, and so on.  Some links are well connected and fire frequently, others have looser connections, and many are more or less out there on their own.  Buonomano's analogy is the Internet where it’s easy to map the connectivity of any node. If you search for “Chicago USA” you get 169m hits; “La Paz Bolivia” returns 3.1m and “Iringa Tanzania” returns just 151k.   This is not just an analogy, it is basically how the brain is strung – the neurons (nodes) store information and whenever they fire together the synapses associating them get a little stronger.   “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”  Interestingly, the “read” operations and the “write” operations both strengthen the association so as you commit something to memory OR as you recall it, the associations become more fixed.

Look to advertisers or politicians for good examples of how this works.  A devious candidate may hurt a relatively unknown opponent with sheer fabrications:  A headline: “Is Mark Peters corrupt?” will tie corruption (and all its nasty connotations) with Peters in our synapses.  We may not even know this is happening.  Years ago a Bush campaign ad was discovered with a nearly-subliminal word “rats” flashed across his opponent’s picture.

There’s a whole lot in the memory chapter.  People remember that someone is a baker more easily than they will remember that their name is Baker – more images and connections simply come to mind with the occupation than the surname.  

Those who can recall strings of 1,000 numbers rely heavily on associations.  One elaborate system assigns a person, an action, and an object to each number 1 – 1,000 to take advantage of pattern separation.  “George Carlin swimming” is very different from “Martha Washington’s doberman.” The numbers 235,694 and 749,209 just feel a lot more similar. 

There is adrenaline-induced flashbulb memories, like a good scare can do.  There is drug-induced memory loss during the important period of consolidation.  Memories are often overwritten, so a witness may confidently identify the "best choice" from a lineup of innocent people, or might be influenced by suggestive questioning.  And we have no “memory delete” module; no effortful “forgetting.”  Yet, oddly, there is some evidence that activating an old memory can actually make it vulnerable to erasure or overwriting because the read/write operations are so closely associated.

There is a chapter on errors about our sense of body.  Minds are housed in the brain, so it’s interesting that we each have a sense of body as me.  Controlling the body is necessary to reproduce, but why is there body consciousness?  “Evolution has not only ensured that the brain has access to the information from our peripheral devices, but that it endowed us with conscious awareness of these devices.  As you lay awake in the dark your brain does not simply verbally report the position of your left arm it goes all out and generates a sense of ownership by projecting the feeling of your arm into the extracranial world.” (93)  We’ve all heard of the mind recreating a limb which has been amputated but, in a sense, all our limbs are phantom.

There is an auditory corollary in the ringing many people hear when they start to lose their hearing for the same pitch; it’s a phantom sound.  Neurologically, the body is laid out in the brain such that adjacent body parts correspond to adjacent brain parts, so when there is a deficit adjacent neighbor neurons and synapses can patch it over.

An excellent chapter on time discussed how we perceive and measure time, how we relate to sequence and delay, and how temporal discounting causes us to make poor choices between short and long term consequences.  We don’t have a sense of time like we do, say, temperature.  We know how hot feels, but how does 4 years feel?  Actually, it depends.  Time seems shorter when we are paying close attention to something, and may change in felt duration depending on whether it is in the future present or past.  For example a hectic day may just fly by, but then looking back it seemed like a long one, judging by how much occurred. 

A weird one, for me, was that when we observe something noisy in the distance the brain actually slows down the visual signal so it matches the sound, which travels more slowly.  Studies verify this, I’m told.

There’s more about time than I have time for and the next chapter, on fear, had a fascinating bit:  Some fears are innate; goslings fear hawks, humans fear angry faces.  Some are learned; we fear losing our jobs.  Others are something in between.   I’d known that chimpanzees are not innately afraid of snakes (babies will play with them), but by watching the reactions of other chimps they can easily catch a lifelong terror of them.  They can’t do the same for, say, rabbits or flowers.   The author speculates (with some support) that humans may have a similar predisposition to fear strangers -- not particular strangers, but those which we are taught to fear early on.  We’re born fearing strangers, we just need to have them pointed out to us.  I just find that depressing.   It’s not all bad though, because by creating an “other,” we create an “us,” and those within one’s own smaller community primates were able to benefit from mutual reciprocal altruism.  It was a very clever solution when we lived amongst murderous marauders. 

The chapter on unreasonable reasoning delves into the same territory Dan Kahneman covered: framing, anchoring, overconfidence, loss aversion, the availability bias, conjunction fallacy: all good stuff.  And then there is the problem of emotions.  Since the amygdala has more connections heading to the cortical area than the other way around, emotions (amygdala) easily overwhelm reason (cortex), leading to all sorts of irrational decisions.

Here is a fun little demonstration of our poor grasp of probabilities:  In Let’s Make a Deal, Monty Hall presented contestants with three rooms, one held a large prize and two had a goat.  The contestants were asked to choose a door, after which Hall opened one of the others, revealing a goat, and then he offered to let the contestant switch or hold.   Some switched, some held; why would switching even matter?  Many people had trouble figuring that out, even though a world cruise or new home was at stake.  As Buonomano put it “we are inept at making probability judgments.”

(answer: always, always switch).

His chapter on Advertising recounted how De Beers turned the flagging diamond industry around with the slogan “diamonds are forever,” thereby creating an expensive engagement essential.  And by associating them with personal, unending love, De Beers guaranteed a continued demand for NEW diamonds.  Very clever.   So by associating a product with something we already value, advertisers build the synapse connections, they take advantage of our natural tendency to imitate peers and those of higher status, and they activate our mirror neurons so we actually feel successful, like in the ad.  Advertisers use loss aversion with free trials, and the “money illusion” to make something appear more valuable by charging more.   So a sweater selling for $30 as “half off” makes it look like a great deal on a better sweater.  But it’s just a $30 sweater.

Another clever trick is using a “decoy,” a product that is much like another but just a little worse.  It could be less somehow, or may be overpriced.  Either way, the decoy will drive up sales for the other one.  For example, an overpriced shrimp dish on the menu will get more people to buy the regular shrimp meal.  If there are two identical cars on the lot except one comes with remote ignition, it will sell better than if the other car wasn’t there.  That’s pathetic, but it’s nice to know why it happens.  First, while it’s so difficult to compare apples and oranges that it can lead to terminal indecision, it’s easy to compare a bruised apple to a good one.  Clear choice, problem solved.  Second, “apple” becomes a more salient idea altogether; after all, you’ve just seen two of them, and only one orange.

The chapter on superstition, and the conclusion were shorter, thinner, a little disappointing, but I’d already  gotten well enough to be satisfied. 

Read this book, if you dare!
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