Bedbugs Have Been Bugging Us Since Before Beds

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora Lichtman. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

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Today on the show, our oldest and least welcome roommates.

LINDSAY MILES: I’m not going to lie. They give me the ick. However, their genetics are really, really interesting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: A certain pest we love to hate– we fear them. We obsess over them. We can’t resist turning them into sitcom plot lines.

JACK: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Jack. And I have bedbugs.

SPEAKER 1: If Jim has bedbugs, that means they’re everywhere. I can’t risk them coming back to Schrute Farms. Our biggest attraction is our 200-year-old mattresses.

SPEAKER 2: That’s our trademark. Yes, trademark, Billy Bedbug.

NORMA: Bedbug? You expect Norma Desmond to appear in a film with a bedbug?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Cimex lectularius, the bedbug. It’s almost always the villain in our narratives, but what’s this little pest’s backstory? Where did they come from? How long have we lived together? It turns out their history with us is ancient and predates even beds. Joining me to give a history lesson on our long relationship with bedbugs is Dr. Lindsay Miles, entomologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Lindsay, welcome to Science Friday.

LINDSAY MILES: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to talk about my research today.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I’m very excited to talk about bedbugs. Let’s start with how long they’ve been around.

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah. So Cimex lectularius as a species has been around for well over a million years. So we are talking definitely before beds were a thing and even before humans were a thing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They predate us.

LINDSAY MILES: They definitely predate us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What were they eating before they were eating us?

LINDSAY MILES: So likely, they were eating some sort of dinosaur, maybe the earliest form of a mammal– but likely a dinosaur.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, it seems like slurping on a dinosaur might take different equipment than slurping on a human. Have they evolved over time? Do we know?

LINDSAY MILES: So I’m sure they’ve evolved a little bit over time, but they have a proboscis. So similar to something like a mosquito, right, it’s that long, stabby, sucky bit. So they’re able to stab through the layers of skin, whether it’s a reptile, whether it’s a human. And then they’re able to slurp up the blood after they’ve done that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: When does their story begin with us?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so around 245,000 years ago, they had jumped from some sort of dinosaur onto a bat in those millions of years. And then 245,000 years ago, they jumped from bats to human. And if you think, OK, 245,000 years ago, that’s well before modern humans. So we’re talking about early human ancestors.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So like Neanderthals and the other variants of early human ancestors, too?

LINDSAY MILES: Absolutely. So one of the things we always think of with Neanderthal is, oh, yeah, they were a bunch of brutes living in caves. And that was partially true. They were absolutely living in caves. And that’s how they started to get bedbugs from the bats that shared the caves with them. So likely a subset of these bedbugs dropped from the bats onto the Neanderthals and really enjoyed the meal that they were eating off of them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLES] Sure. Why not? I mean, the thing, though, is I think of bedbugs as wanting the finer things in life, like a bed. Where did they live when they were living with early humans?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so they lived in the cave with them on whatever kind of surface that they were sleeping on. Early humans have been making bed-like structures. So definitely, they got their name in more recent years, when most people have what we consider currently a bed. But there were always designated sleeping areas, and that’s where they would hang out.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have any other bugs lived with us for this long?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so one other bug that we have a really tight connection with is human head lice.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ah.

LINDSAY MILES: Mm-hmm.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Sure.

LINDSAY MILES: But the thing with head lice is that they’re always with humans, and previous research hasn’t really seen the association with cities like we do with bedbugs, right? When your child goes to daycare, they come home, they have head lice, you give them that treatment, and it’s over. But with bedbugs, you get one bedbug, all it takes is one pregnant female, and now you have an insane infestation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, we know. OK, so what about cities? As people started forming cities, what happened to bedbugs?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so after the Neanderthals started coming out of the caves, they started intermixing with humans. And again, they’re sharing beds, so they’re sharing bedbugs. Then humans start having these early villages. These bedbug populations aren’t super high yet because they are these small, isolated populations.

Then in the early human history, we started building cities, right? So you can think ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia. There’s lots of archaeological evidence of early cities. As soon as we start building cities, we start having these massive populations.

By massive in early human history, we’re talking like 2,000, 3,000 people. But again, that’s more than a family of five for the bedbugs to be able to start chomping on. So as our population density increases with city, so, too, does the bedbugs.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do we see bedbug fossils in ancient archaeological sites?

LINDSAY MILES: We do. There are some early evidence of at least maybe not our specific bedbug, but there are their earlier ancestors in fossil evidence.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How else do you track them over time? Is it just fossil evidence, or do you look at their genes, too?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah. So one of the really cool things is your DNA holds a ton of history, not just your personal history, but your entire species’ history. And so that’s actually what I’m looking at in the study that we had. I am looking across the entire genome of both bat and human bedbug lineages.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And what’s your lab like? I mean, do you have a closet full of bedbugs?

LINDSAY MILES: We have a freezer full of bedbugs.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Someone’s nightmare, your dream.

LINDSAY MILES: Right, exactly. Yeah, we have thousands of bedbugs in little sample containers in our freezer. And what we do is we extract the DNA out of those, and then we send it off to sequencing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What about pesticides? How have bedbugs changed with the invention of pesticides?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so they’re really an interesting species to look at because they’re really highly inbred.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They’re highly inbred, even though there’s so many of them?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah. So your infestation– well, maybe not your personal infestation.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: No. No, Lindsay, please don’t tell me.

LINDSAY MILES: But any given infestation is actually because it’s sponsored by one female. Then you have offspring getting together with each other. And so you get really high levels of inbreeding, which means that any given infestation has very low genetic diversity. But despite that, they are really amazing at gaining mutations that make them insecticide resistant.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How can they do that? If there’s low genetic diversity, how are they good at getting mutations?

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so mutations are a thing that happens in everyone’s DNA all the time, OK? And so what will happen is a random mutation can pop up. And because it is super beneficial, it will stay in a population.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So it’s quantity. There’s enough bedbugs that you’re going to get some mutations.

LINDSAY MILES: Exactly. And because something like an insecticide resistance mutation is so beneficial, it’s likely every starting propagule of an infestation has that mutation, right? It only takes one really good mutation, and then it can end up spreading to everything.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Was there a time when we thought we could wipe them out?

LINDSAY MILES: Oh, absolutely. So back in the 1950s, we used this fantastic thing called DDT. There’s lots of really cool media out there. You can look into where they say, DDT is good for me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is it, though? [LAUGHS]

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, so we found out, not long after using it, it was really not good for people. And we thought we had eliminated the bedbug populations. We didn’t see them in these super-high frequencies, so we thought, we got this. Unfortunately, we didn’t get this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLES]

LINDSAY MILES: They had– within five years of putting down that pesticide, there were populations that show mutations that are resistant to DDT. So then, after that five years, those small populations become large populations.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Of super-bedbugs, basically.

LINDSAY MILES: Oh, yeah, absolute super-bedbugs. And then as those populations increase, in that same time frame, after the 1950s, global human travel became a thing, right? And it’s something that many people can do. It’s not just for the ultra-wealthy. A little side note– the ultra-wealthy are also people who can spread bedbugs.

So when we start traveling globally, we are moving bedbugs along with us. And now they’re also resistant to insecticides. So we’ve got these, now, superbugs that we have moved around all over the world.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. Bedbugs are so maligned. I want to see them through your eye stalks. Do you have a special appreciation for them?

LINDSAY MILES: I really do. So I–

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] Make the case.

LINDSAY MILES: OK, I’m not going to lie. They give me the ick, right? When I see live bedbugs, because sometimes people will send us samples, I definitely get the ick. However, from a genetic lens, these are a really interesting and unique species.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It feels to me kind of insane to call them bedbugs since they had a whole life before beds.

LINDSAY MILES: They sure did.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How should we rebrand them? I think they need a new name, and I think we should try to come up with it.

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, I mean, like tiny blood suckers.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Blood bugs?

LINDSAY MILES: Blood bugs, yep.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Should we mount a campaign with our listeners?

LINDSAY MILES: I think so.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Listeners, if you have a better name for the bedbug, we want to hear it. Call us, 8774-SCIFRI. 8774-SCIFRI. Tell us your new name for bedbugs and how you arrived at it. Lindsay, thanks for taking us on this trip down Bedbug Lane.

LINDSAY MILES: Yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Lindsay Miles, entomologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. And if you need a palate cleanser from talking about bedbugs, may we interest you in some pretty pictures of butterflies? Read our story about how scientists studied a cross-continental butterfly migration and the photographer who snapped photos along the way. Visit sciencefriday.com/butterflyphoto to check it out.

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We have to take a quick break. And when we come back, if bedbugs give you the ick, we have a surprise for you– ancient wasps that caught prey with their butts.

LARS VILHELMSEN: The further back we go in time, the more weird insect life becomes and the further we have to look for modern parallels. In this case, we had to go outside the animal kingdom.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Don’t go away.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Entomologists report a new fossil find– a prehistoric wasp that had a one-of-a-kind attack method. It seemed to grab its prey with its butt flaps, capturing its booty in its booty, kind of like a toochus flytrap. And then once the wasp had its prey in tail, it injected its parasitic eggs into it, which would then hatch and slowly devour the victim from the inside out. Here to tell us more is Lars Vilhelmsen, curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Welcome to Science Friday, Lars.

LARS VILHELMSEN: Thank you very much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Give us a character sketch of this wasp. When did it live?

LARS VILHELMSEN: Yeah, I mean, it’s a 100-million-year-old wasp from the Cretaceous, at the same time as we had dinosaurs still living on the Earth. It’s well preserved in amber, from what is known as Myanmar amber.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Myanmar amber?

LARS VILHELMSEN: Yeah. So it was probably living in a forest area. And in fact, we found 16 specimens of this very particular wasp, so we were able to study its anatomy in greater detail than we would normally be able to.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Would you agree with my assessment that it captured prey in its butt flaps?

LARS VILHELMSEN: That’s what we write in the paper. So that’s how we imagine that this could have happened.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m certain you didn’t use the term “butt flaps” in the paper.

LARS VILHELMSEN: No, we’re talking about abdominal flaps, the sixth and seventh segment of the abdomen of the wasp.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And how do they seem to work? Are they triggered mechanically? How do they actually trap a victim?

LARS VILHELMSEN: Yeah, I mean, we imagine that this wasp was– I mean, it doesn’t seem to have been able to move very fast. The legs are not very long. And so we imagine it would probably wait like an ambush, with the trap open. And on the edge of the lower flap of the trap, there are some very elongated hairs extending fan-like. And we imagine these served as trigger hairs.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And this is how a Venus fly trap works, right, the trigger hairs.

LARS VILHELMSEN: Yeah, yeah, more or less. I mean, the Venus fly trap, the trigger hair sits inside the flaps, so the fly or whatever the plant has to catch has to move all the way in between the leaves. That might not have been necessary for the host of this wasp. So when a potential victim or host moved just behind the abdomen of the wasp, the wasp could sense it and then quickly launch backwards and grasp the host in the flaps.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You wrote in the paper that this apparatus is unlike anything previously reported in any insect known to us.

LARS VILHELMSEN: I mean, none of us have seen anything like it before. I mean, at first, when we saw this, we thought it must be some kind of artifact, some kind of deformation of the specimen, which is not uncommon.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, like you didn’t even think it was real?

LARS VILHELMSEN: No, not at first glance. And as far as we know, I mean, you can never know for certain what an extinct organism lived like, I mean, how it used its anatomical features to go around its daily life.

So what you do, you compare with organisms living today. And the further back we go in time, the more weird insect life becomes and the further we have to look for modern parallels. In this case, we had to go outside the animal kingdom to find something that we thought resembled what we were looking at.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you think that insects get overlooked? I mean, if you found a dinosaur that used its butt to capture prey, I feel like it would be headline news.

LARS VILHELMSEN: Yeah, for sure. And this is– I mean, it’s very unusual for me to have a paper getting so much attention. This has never happened to me before. So I certainly feel that insects are overlooked in general, but I mean, they basically invented everything that humans could think of and usually millions of years before humans. I mean, they have invented agriculture. You have leafcutter ants doing that, and, yeah, I mean, almost everything you could think of.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s this wasp’s name so we know what to call it in our nightmares?

LARS VILHELMSEN: Yeah, it’s Sirenobethylus charybdis. This is a fancy name, of course. I mean, charybdis refers to a monster in ancient Greek mythology which almost swallowed Odysseus when he was traveling the world. And, yeah, Sirenobethylus was– I mean, a siren was also a monster that lured sailors to their deaths.

But it’s also because there’s a group of mammals, sea cows and manatees, and the tail of a manatee in outline actually looks like the flap of this wasp also. So that was another reason to name this species like this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love it. Thank you, Lars.

LARS VILHELMSEN: You’re welcome. Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Lars Vilhelmsen, curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

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