Your Home Is Filled With Bugs
January 19, 2016 6:20 AM   Subscribe

Census Finds Lots of Bugs in 50 US Homes Aside from pets, family members, or roommates, many of us often go weeks without seeing another living thing in our homes. But appearances can be deceiving. We are, in fact, surrounded by arthropods—insects, spiders, centipedes, and other animals with hard external skeletons and jointed legs. They are the most successful animals on the planet, and the walls that shield our homes to the elements are no barriers to them. In the first systematic census of its kind, a team of entomologists combed through 50 American houses for every arthropod they could find, and discovered a startling amount of diversity.

... The team only looked at houses in Raleigh, a temperate-zone city surrounded by forest. They might find fewer species in sparser environment, or more species in the tropics, or more pests in a dense city.
posted by narancia (79 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Some articles on Metafilter I forward along to my wife. Others I do not. Guess which category this falls under?
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:31 AM on January 19, 2016 [15 favorites]


Is your wife an arthropod? That could affect my answer.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:36 AM on January 19, 2016 [41 favorites]


The article has very little real data, the actual journal article with all the findings is located here.
posted by HuronBob at 6:37 AM on January 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Oh, phew! The houses were in Raleigh. There is certainly not a similar amount of creepy-crawliness to be found all the way out here in Durham. No sirree! Definitely a totally different place.
Golly! Having read this article, I now feel very comforted and not the least bit ready to bathe my skin and all my furniture in a vat of bleach and pesticides.
posted by Dorinda at 6:39 AM on January 19, 2016 [26 favorites]


I can see the census now.
What is Person 1's race? Mark ☒ one or more boxes.
☒ Some other Race - Print Race
vers libre cockroach
posted by zamboni at 6:43 AM on January 19, 2016 [11 favorites]


I have developed a great admiration for centipedes, ever since learning they kill cockroaches and other household pests. I still feel a thrill of visceral horror every time I see one, but I no longer try to squish them to death.
posted by spacewaitress at 6:43 AM on January 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


They're watching me right now, aren't they?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:45 AM on January 19, 2016 [9 favorites]


Aunt of an old family friend of ours lives across the street from the Virginia house that used to belong to Linda Bird Johnson in the late sixties. Later owner did some renovation and found a whole lot of bugs.

True story!
posted by BWA at 6:48 AM on January 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


I have no particular fear of bugs, but there is something...unnatural about those house centipede things. Once I tried to squash one with my slipper, caught the back half of its body...and the front half kept running until it disappeared under my stove. Most living organisms tend to die if you chop off 50% of their body, but not those things.

I tried to tell my wife they're "good" bugs because they eat other bugs, but this failed to make her feel better about their (occasional) presence in our home.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:48 AM on January 19, 2016 [8 favorites]


They're watching me right now, aren't they?

Nah, we they definitely aren't. No reason to suspect that at all!
posted by curious nu at 6:50 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


House centipedes, while really freaky, are good at eating other bugs. We had one. I named him Fred.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:51 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Ah, the pitter-patter of little feet.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:52 AM on January 19, 2016 [22 favorites]


House centipedes, while really freaky, are good at eating other bugs. We had one. I named him Fred.

I just logged in to sing the praises of house centipedes - we have two beautiful tiger-striped ones that hang out in our bathroom that the kids and I call "Legs" and "Icky".
posted by ryanshepard at 6:54 AM on January 19, 2016 [17 favorites]


If I have time and patience spiders just go out the back door, but a huge wigglie centipede like thing coming up a drain does get flushed.

grumpybear69... just where do you keep 'Fred'?
posted by sammyo at 6:55 AM on January 19, 2016


I have developed a great admiration for centipedes, ever since learning they kill cockroaches and other household pests. I still feel a thrill of visceral horror every time I see one, but I no longer try to squish them to death.

My last apartment was a virtual house centipede habitat, and blessedly roach-free, but I never knew this. It's now my personal headcanon that the classic Atari game is in fact a depiction of a blasted post-human future, where giant irradiated centipedes menace the plucky, anthropomorphic blattidae who have inherited the earth.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:55 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I got a really good primer on the types of bugs you can find in your house the summer I lived with two entomologists. Their enthusiasm was cool and all, but I knew when one of them would come running towards me with clasped hands and a big smile, it was time to nope the fuck out.

The other reason I'm happy to no longer live there is that I no longer have to worry about them putting their latest find in the fridge for preservation. But, in retrospect, that may have helped me keep the freshman fifteen off.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 6:57 AM on January 19, 2016 [10 favorites]


I developed a great horror of cockroaches all at once, one summer in Annapolis, when I was working at an auction house with a friend, and we fumigated a dresser or chest of drawers or some such thing. Standard practice, no problem. What usually doesn't happen is that cockroaches start pouring out of the furniture, in a wave, like it's the oogie-boogie man bursting open, and you can just barely hear yourself wondering, over the mind-fixating noise of thousands of legs speeding across concrete, where the hell they all keep coming from.

I mean, I didn't like them before, either, but after that I really didn't like them.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:02 AM on January 19, 2016 [22 favorites]


I'm on the 17th floor in a condo just south of Chicago's Loop and a couple freezing nights ago saw a decent sized spider running across the floor. I was impressed by his prowess so I let him go about his business.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 7:04 AM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


I do not like centipedes, but I am pretty tolerant of spiders, to the point where I warned all of them that a kitten was coming to live in the apartment, and that they should move further up the walls. Alas, the spiders did not listen to my Jonah-like jeremiad, and my apartment now has very few spiders and no centipedes. The kitten has put on a great deal of weight, but I think that's more due to growing to adulthood than eating 8 pounds of bugs.

Although he is an awfully wiggly cat.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:17 AM on January 19, 2016 [10 favorites]


I have learned from my Allergist that cockroaches can exacerbate certain allergies and make your life even more miserable while remaining invisible to you in your own goddam home . So yeah, fuck cockroaches.

Now that I have learned that centipedes kill them I will practice the koan "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" but I doubt I'll ever overcome the visceral horror of actually seeing a centipede in real life.
posted by Doleful Creature at 7:17 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Our cat is a dedicated bug-chaser, but other than that, I steadfastly refuse to think about critters in my house. It's better that way.

We moved from the country into town this last time and the drop-off in critter volume was nice. Or maybe the ones in town are stealthier and more citified.
posted by emjaybee at 7:20 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


After growing up in row houses in NJ, I'm happy to live somewhere with a minimum of cockroaches. I think that I've seen a total of three of those bastards in the whole time that I've lived here. The mosquitoes are pretty tame here too.

Now if we could just get rid of the damn stink bugs.
posted by octothorpe at 7:21 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


next you'll tell me that my body is covered in germs, that my bananas are made out of chemicals, and my drinking water is dosed with fluoride
posted by runt at 7:26 AM on January 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


“You don't have a giant scarab beetle living under your TV,” says Bertone, reassuringly.

Well, that's disappointing. I would LOVE to have a giant scarab beetle living under the TV.
posted by desuetude at 7:33 AM on January 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


Now if we could just get rid of the damn stink bugs.

At my previous apartment, it was basically all stink bugs all the time between the months of September and February. The smelly fuckers would never have the decency to die from the cold like other bugs, they'd just migrate indoors and make buzzing sounds behind all of my picture frames for six months.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:35 AM on January 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Personally, I consult the Welcome to Night Vale twitter feed for urgent updates on arthropod proximity. It is both informative and interesting.
posted by delfin at 7:36 AM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


I haven't seen any spiders since the fire and now I am in a horrible construction sandwich and I don't think my little webby friends will ever return.

who is going to eat the mosquitoes

sob
posted by poffin boffin at 7:41 AM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


who is going to eat the mosquitoes

Probably celebrities on a teevee show.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:42 AM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


So it's a feature and a bug.
posted by kozad at 7:44 AM on January 19, 2016 [11 favorites]


I once moved in (and quickly out of) an apartment that was infested with cockroaches. I had checked it out during the day and it seemed fine, but when I went into the kitchen the first night after I moved in and turned on the light *dozens* of them went scurrying everywhere. Then I was told that for every one you see there are 10/50/100 (reports varied) more you don't see, so that wasn't good news. The landlord (who lived in the building) and I put down traps and he had an exterminator come in and do his thing, and we did seem to be putting a dent in their numbers, but one night about three weeks into my stay one crawled over my shoulder while I was in bed and woke me up and that was it. I started packing in the middle of the night, called a friend with a van first thing in the morning and got the hell out of there. Fortunately they didn't seem to have gotten into my stuff, as I read they often do, and did not make the move with me.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:45 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


>who is going to eat the mosquitoes

Probably celebrities on a teevee show.


Or bats. Bats love bugs!

Or, if we are really lucky, celebrity bats on TV shows!

(Chittering in the Dutch language!)
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:50 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I’m not sure what kind of centipedes people are talking about, but if you live in the Southwest centipedes in your house may be different.
posted by bongo_x at 7:58 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Cue heebie-jeebies in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
posted by slkinsey at 8:01 AM on January 19, 2016


>who is going to eat the mosquitoes

Dragon flies and damsel flies, swallows and fish, if you can get them.
posted by BWA at 8:02 AM on January 19, 2016


Charlotte's Web left a lasting impression on me, so spiders are a-ok as long as they keep out of the way and write encouraging words in their webs.

Roaches are gross, awful, terrible, no good, yucky, bad, bad, bad. I'm from Florida where it was wise to turn on the enclosed garage light before you ventured into the garage, lest you feel the pitter patter of roaches running over your feet & legs.

And now I'm in Texas where the wasps and moths have somehow been exposed to something that makes them as big as my dang fist and they are aggressive too! Ugh, bugs.
posted by lootie777 at 8:04 AM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


I've been working on a long-term renovation project for a client in Baltimore, and I ended up giving up on my billowing woodsmanlike beard largely because, unlike my house, the rafters and niches and little stone corners of the place I've been rebuilding are all swarming with centipedes and silverfish, who, as I disrupted their quiet home environments with my work, were tending to find a new refuge in my beard. At the end of the day, with my tools packed up, I'd stand next to my truck and carefully comb them out, trying to be gentle partly because I didn't want to hurt them and partly because I didn't want legs in my facial upholstery.

Of course, you'd never quite get them all, so after a few daring escapes when a silverfish would make a break for a more upmarket beard neighborhood whilst I was attempting to be a genteel craftsman in polite company, usually taking a conspicuous shortcut across my face, I clipped on the #1 and shaved it down to a mediocre scruff. They're zippy things, those multilegged ones, though they added to my mythos among my friends of being more than a little horrifying. The only ones that particularly mortified me, for whatever reason, were the largest, and most harmless centipedes that splayed out in undulating feathery waves like a drag queen's best false eyelashes out for a fitness run, but even those were just something you'd brush off, screaming, and then laugh.

I love them all. I mean, not cockroaches, which I have a visceral disdain for that came from my first venture at living on my own, in a basement apartment with curiously dynamic wallpaper and a need for absolutely everything to be in tins or plastic bowls with lids you had to snap on. Cockroaches kept my weight down in my first few years in the apartment where I've lived for twenty-eight years, because one sight of a monstrous roach scrabbling along with an egg pod would kill my appetite for days, but despite the claims that you can't get rid of them, I did, with enough poison, boric acid, and other chemical nightmares that I'll probably spent the last year of my life writhing in agony...but then again, I've been able to eat with pleasure for the last twenty-five years, so it's probably a decent trade-off.

I love that these animals are everywhere, though, because I am a firm believer that we have gotten our bizarre human mythos completely wrong, in creating a world that is somehow divided between the "natural" and the "man-made." We add it to the weight of spiritual dung we carry on our backs like hunched-over beetles miserably riding the subway to miserable jobs, always sure that we, as a species, are somehow dirty and evil and wrong, and we fling that nonsense around without ever managing to understand that humans launching Cassini at Saturn is as natural as termites undermining our foundations in a miracle of symbiotic biology.

And yes, sometimes, I have the opportunity to practice my homo superior snobbery, gently removing a pretty black spider from my kitchen sink and examining her carefully where she sits on the web between my thumb and forefinger until I catch a sight of red, then spend a panicky minute with her there as I look up the regional habitats for black widows spiders on a tablet with my clumsy left hand, then walk quickly out of the house with that hand held as still as someone defusing a bomb whilst simultaneously screaming like a little girl until I could fling her into the flower bed and dance around the front walk in a full-body fit of the heebie-jeebies.

But they're all around, even in what we think is our special, set-aside province, because we are nothing without them, from the monsters of unseen decomposition and rebirth to the murderous struggles of parasites and predators and harvesters and everything, all seething and buzzing and skittering along around us as perfectly as clouds of electrons in uncertain orbit around jostling wads of barely comprehensible energy. Like an old cartoon, the whole planet around us is throbbing with life, all dancing and twitching and going about the tasks that make a living world what it is.

We think we're different, or better, and we do bring altruism to bear as one of the first species to practice that and poetry, but the canvas is still inseparable from us, which should make us think of our place in things in a way far removed from how we see it with the blinders of our expectations.

A cave cricket will often make his way into my bathroom, then into my shower, and then just perch there for days, up in the corner, like the victim of a particularly mean fraternity hazing ritual in which you don't get into the club until you've watch the giant pulpy pink thing wash his floppy, terrifying parts with some sort of foam.

"Don't you jump on me," I say, as if he'd ever understanding the sound of air flapping through internal meat folds and the nightmarish flubbery mouthparts with which humans do horrible, horrible things. "Just stay up there and don't jump on me, or I'm going to flush you down the drain, no matter what those Jains think."

And he stays, and I wash up, and the day goes on, and a thousand lives come and go around me, just out of sight, and that's terrifying and wonderful and grotesque and amazing and if they'll just stay out of my food, not eat my joists, and refrain from biting me, all will be settled and comfortable for all concerned.

On a rare occasion, a huge stag beetle will wind up on my front porch after a wrong turn from the loamy comfort of the mulch and flower beds, as shiny as a well-polished motorcycle, and I'll stop in my day to just sit and watch as it makes its way across the peeling paint of the floorboards and get up my nerve to let it walk right onto my hand, saying "Hello again, Clark Nova," as the first stabby little leg touches me, and then the others, and then it's just there, all perfect and enormous, with those cartoonishly huge mouthclaws working ever so gently like a kid biting his lip as he's thinking something out, and—

okay, I think I want you to not be on my hand anymore. Let's put you down right here, little shiny.
posted by sonascope at 8:15 AM on January 19, 2016 [62 favorites]




Ha, in a drafty 1890ish rowhouse, there's no point in attempting a state of denial about having some buggy roommates.

We have a deal with our spiders and centipedes, and they hold to it pretty well. Basically, they need to stay out of our way; I do not want to be startled by something crawly close to my hands or toes or head or food. So, the spiders largely stick to the basement, where many varieties have places to make their webs and live out undisturbed happy spider lives. Cobwebs in living spaces get cleared, but I don't go to any extra effort to chase down the perpetrators. The house centipedes roam the upper part of the higher ceilings, particularly in the upstairs hallway.

The gorram fruit flies get to die drunk in a glass of entrapment wine. The type of roaches we very occasionally see in the house are not German cockroaches; they're lost Oriental roaches who would prefer to be in our storm drains, but they get squashed for their transgressions regardless. Flies get casually flyswatted but if they find their way out instead, that's fine. Ants get wiped out and the boric acid and/or traps get put out. I have no way of systematically exterminating the motherfucking mosquitoes, dust mites, or clothing moths, but I do my best to disrupt and discourage.

Weirdly, I occasionally get a random lacewing upstairs in our back bedroom. I would happily lend them a bit of real estate inside so that they could move to my garden in the growing season (they are very beneficial insects) but no luck so far in communicating this.
posted by desuetude at 8:20 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


This current home of mine has a surplus of house centipedes, which the cat and I had formerly opted to murder. But then the boyfriend found a cockroach hanging out on the dining room sideboard (mostly dead already, tbh, possibly quite lost) and so I have sworn détente with the centipedes.

We live in a major city and our apartment is over 100 years old. I have no doubt that there are roaches in the building. Hell, there are probably load-bearing roaches in the building.

But if the centipedes want to monitor the perimeter and keep those nasty brown fuckers in the basement where they belong, I'll not stop them anymore.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:21 AM on January 19, 2016 [8 favorites]


grumpybear69... just where do you keep 'Fred'?

He was a free roamer. We'd see him sometimes in the sink. He lives on Staten Island, though, and we haven't seen him in years. Hopefully he'll get a FB account one of these days.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:26 AM on January 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


Dragon flies and damsel flies, swallows and fish, if you can get them.

I don't think I have any of those in my house either.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:29 AM on January 19, 2016


ryanshepard: I just logged in to sing the praises of house centipedes - we have two beautiful tiger-striped ones that hang out in our bathroom that the kids and I call "Legs" and "Icky".

Having kids has made me enjoy insects more, because I wanted to counter the "eww, a bug!" *smash* reaction some little (and big) people have. I'm the official arthropod catcher in our house, and sometimes I take time to show our son a really interesting looking insect after I've caught it in a clear plastic container, before I escort the insect outside.

I like insects in our home (to a degree), because they remind me that we people aren't so high and mighty.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:29 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm fine with all the bugs living in my walls, so long as they stay in the walls. Once they're on my turf, it's a little different. Here's the deal, bugs, and I'm looking at you in particular house centipede: when I see you I will look away for a moment. If you're gone when I look back, we're good. If you're still there, probably you are going to meet the underside of my slipper.

Except silverfish, silverfish are crushed on site. They eat books!
posted by looli at 8:30 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


A good D&D monster: "The lacewing larva senses your presence. Roll against Death Fart at +2."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:35 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


We had so many bugs and critters living with us (or letting us live with them) in our old house (weevils; spiders of all kinds, mostly recluses; veritable nation-states of ants) that in the new(er) one we moved to recently not having them is a little bit creepy.
posted by blucevalo at 8:42 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I live in Florida. This is not news.
posted by Splunge at 8:44 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I moved from Michigan to join my wife in Memphis, TN, where I became acquainted with the Palmetto bug. This is the giant cockroach that lives in the South.
The older ladies at the church would say to me, "hush, that's a garden bug," and remind me that the really scary cockroaches were the little german ones.

With every fiber of my being I say to this, "Bull. Shit."

By the time I had arrived in Memphis my spouse had grown accustomed to watching our cat chase them down and crunch them up like doritos. Which I found delightful. And it made me feel like a great pagan Caesar in the Colosseum.

And then came the horror. My wife is always cold, especially at night. She sleeps under a heap of blankets and I sleep next to her. I sweat a lot when I sleep. I run hot.
The cockroaches would crawl over my body and lick the salt off of my bare skin. I woke up to the gentle tapping of elongated antennae against my cheekbones as it chewed the sweat out of my beard. I remember reaching up and wrapping my hand around it - throwing it toward the wall as hard as I could. There was a thump as it struck the plasterboard and then the skittering of too many little feet.

Once, standing on the bed, bedroom lights blazing, I threw a boot at a roach on the headboard.
The boot missed and the bug spread its stygian wings and took to the air. It flew directly toward me and landed on my bare chest. I punched my own sternum so hard that I fell backward off the bed onto the floor.

I eventually purchased a case of silicon sealant from the hardware store and sealed our apartment so tightly that it could function as a swimming pool. This eliminated the problem.

We moved back to Michigan. Here, the bugs are more reasonable.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:46 AM on January 19, 2016 [21 favorites]


In the house where I raised the kids, we had giant centipedes and wolf spiders in the shelf basement. They patrolled the perimeters. We had tiny ants come to the cutting board for a week as spring broke out, and bigger ants that came for a week when summer arrived. I learned they were a brief migration cut short by the troops in the basement. So I just noted the changing seasons by the ant clock. Wherever life takes me there is always a spider who wants to hang out where the ceiling meets the wall over my bed. That spider is short lived.

This story, published in main stream media today; the cynic in me wonders if someone was prompted to do the research, and publish It, by the bug killin' industry?
posted by Oyéah at 8:52 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Centipedes trigger some primordial part of my lizard brain; my horror manifests as rage. I become furious at any centipede that dares to exist in my presence. I take it personally. I'm also irritated simply because I know I will be unable to do anything else until I have hunted it down and destroyed it, which can be difficult because those fuckers are fast.

The only ones that particularly mortified me, for whatever reason, were the largest, and most harmless centipedes that splayed out in undulating feathery waves like a drag queen's best false eyelashes out for a fitness run

Those bastards are reason #967 for why I left Maryland.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:07 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Once I tried to squash one with my slipper, caught the back half of its body...and the front half kept running until it disappeared under my stove. Most living organisms tend to die if you chop off 50% of their body, but not those things.
-posted by The Card Cheat


A friend of mine made this comment on Facebook, in a conversation about 'proper' centipedes in your house (bad) versus house centipedes (good):
We had those house centipedes in Kentucky. If you spray them with bug spray, they disassemble themselves and drop all their legs. Hngnyenenuh!
So now I hear "Hngnyenenuh!" in my head whenever I see a house centipede. Then I reluctantly leave it alone.
posted by workerant at 9:30 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Earwigs. Those fuckers have it in for me.

The spiders I don't understand are the little wispy ones which leave endless webs everywhere which don't actually seem to be anything other than a way to travel. My workshop consists of hundreds, nay thousands, of those and the innumerable pill bugs. I've tried reasoning with the pill bugs: "there is nothing here for you but death" which is true: spiders or desiccation is all that awaits them, but there they are in their thousands.

The spiders, if they live in any one place for any length of time, leave guano below their house which is one of the hardest-to-remove substances there is out there.
posted by maxwelton at 9:39 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I have a superstition about killing both centipedes and spiders, out of the hope that they will keep away any other bugs. My house is blessedly free of centipedes (and thank the arthro-god, because they are creepy as fuck), but there has been a colony of daddy longlegs quietly living in a dark corner of my bathroom for a while now.

I have a certain affection for my arachnid houseguests, since I contribute their arrival to helping end the Summer of Where Are All These Fruit Flies Coming From. They've been there a long time though (in bug terms), and despite the article, I can't imagine they get a lot of prey. Or that they get out much or have many new arrivals.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm worried I might be harboring a colony of inbred, cannibalistic spiders.
posted by Panjandrum at 9:40 AM on January 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm very fond of my bugs. Or to be precise, my spiders. I live in a old house where the only air conditioning is screens and fans. Bugs come in, and my spiders hunt them down. They are mostly quite polite creatures; the Pholcidae mostly live up on the 10 foot ceilings, and the wolf spiders tuck themselves away under bookshelves and other dark corners. They are wonderfully elegant hunters, and they eat the fruit flies when I get an infestation, and they eat the houseflies that buzz annoyingly, and they eat the moths that would like to eat my dry goods.

Plus, they are fascinating to watch. I've gotten wonderful close up looks at them shedding their skins -- it's almost impossible to believe they get those long legs out of their old carapace. And now is the time of the Reaping; the house has been sealed up for winter for a couple of months now, the last fruit fly infestation was knocked out some time ago, so now they are hunting each other. I watched one hunt near the sink, the loser almost seeming to cringe away from the aggressor... but they didn't run in time, and when I came back, they were being wrapped up.

In a month or so, the windows will be open again, and the strongest will produce a new generation.
posted by tavella at 9:57 AM on January 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


after a bedbug infestation, i see any other bug and it's like 'hey' 'hey' 'you eat bedbugs, right?' 'yeah bra' 'okay then carry on'
posted by angrycat at 10:03 AM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


Our basement is dark and damp and full of 'pedes.

I'm not happy when I see them, but on the other hand, I haven't seen a cockroach in all the years we've been here. Many years ago we shared an apartment a mile or so away with so many cockroaches I was ready to buy a gecko to deal with 'em.

Sign says they also eat termites, ants, moths, silverfish, and bedbugs. We had a bedbug scare a while back, but none have actually been sighted. Perhaps the 'pedes got them first. Lucky us.

My video game playing friends used to say "Kill 'pedes" but I say "Go 'pedes!
 
posted by Herodios at 10:10 AM on January 19, 2016


I, for one, welcome my insect housemates. They are literally aliens living among us. I wonder at what thoughts run though their alien heads, and what they make of me and my humans and pets as they gaze on us through their alien eyes? I wonder too at the thoughts running through the minds of the (mammalian) pets, but they seem more relatable. Who needs sci-fi when there are insects?
posted by jetsetsc at 10:12 AM on January 19, 2016


And old Abehammerb never slept again.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:19 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I wonder at what thoughts run though their alien heads

"Food/Not food."

I wonder too at the thoughts running through the minds of the (mammalian) pets

"Food/Not food."
"Play/Not play."
"Tell Mommy/Not tell Mommy."
 
posted by Herodios at 10:26 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Old house....we have so many stinkbugs come in, we have given up. They are harmless if you leave them alone. My kids have named them all Cletus. The ladybugs are pretty bad too. Have them EVERYWHERE! My daughter has caught several and feeds them with water soaked raisins. They are thriving. Being in the south, in the summer, we have Palmetto Bugs ( i refuse to say roach ) and I go all nuclear but the stinkbugs and ladybugs are permanent guests.
posted by pearlybob at 10:26 AM on January 19, 2016


“You don't have a giant scarab beetle living under your TV,” says Bertone, reassuringly.

But if I did I would name him Horace and we would watch Mummy films together!
posted by thivaia at 10:27 AM on January 19, 2016


You don't have a giant scarab beetle living under your TV,” says Bertone, reassuringly.


Speak for yourself. Me and Ptahhotep get along just fine.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:35 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I spent about five years living in Alabama, in a heavily wooded subdivision a ways out of town. Our home was right up against some undeveloped forest and I shudder to think now about how not a big deal it seemed that at any given moment I could walk across the carpet in our basement rec room and see 2-3 bugs of different types. Not roaches or anything gross, just benign little millipedes or spiders.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:35 AM on January 19, 2016


And now I'm in Texas where the wasps and moths have somehow been exposed to something that makes them as big as my dang fist and they are aggressive too!


Texas. They were exposed to Texas.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:43 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


And now I'm in Texas where the wasps and moths have somehow been exposed to something that makes them as big as my dang fist and they are aggressive too! Ugh, bugs.

The wasps are definitely bad (especially yellowjackets, the fuckers), but those moths ain't gonna hurt you.
posted by emjaybee at 11:31 AM on January 19, 2016


The wasps are definitely bad (especially yellowjackets, the fuckers), but those moths ain't gonna hurt you.


Well, one of them flew in the window a few weeks ago, and I swear to God if I hadn't swerved out of the way, it would have hit my head and knocked me over. Big As My Fist.

I punched my own sternum so hard that I fell backward off the bed onto the floor

I sprained my foot getting away from a Palmetto bug that flew into my hair. I was sitting in bed, and the damn thing had been hiding in a moving box and flew right into my head. I screamed, grabbed it and threw it against the wall as I fell out of bed and landed badly on my ankle. It wasn't dead - I had to drag myself into the bathroom and grab bug spray to kill the thing. The doctor made me get an x-ray, because he thought my ankle was broken.


Texas. They were exposed to Texas.


I can't argue with that.
posted by lootie777 at 11:45 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


there has been a colony of daddy longlegs quietly living in a dark corner of my bathroom for a while now.

Oh man, daddy longlegs. When I was a kid there was a pretty rudimentary treehouse in my backyard. One summer afternoon, I decided to climb up there and found the entire interior to be completely black. It took me a minute to focus and realize that not only was it black, but it was moving. Turns out that an egg sac had hatched what seemed like thousands of longlegs were currently making my treehouse their home.

I remember just letting go of the ladder and dropping the whole way to the ground, walking over to the water hose with unnatural calm and proceeding to power wash the living hell out of the inside from the ground.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 12:19 PM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


We had one who knows how many [house centipedes]. I named him them Fred.

FTFY.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:01 PM on January 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
posted by paper chromatographologist at 1:11 PM on January 19, 2016


"For a picture of eternity, imagine spider feet tickling a human face — forever."
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:43 PM on January 19, 2016


We moved back to Michigan. Here, the bugs are more reasonable.

Oh, babybalrog. I am also a Michigander who lived in the south—Florida, for me—and suffered the same kind of horrors you did. Only I was a very young woman living alone with my cats, and my reaction to palmetto bugs was to spray them with bug killer while I screamed.

If I called them "giant flying cockroaches," pedantic Floridians would tell me they were not, technically, cockroaches, which I thought was completely beside the point.

I've been back in Michigan for more than 20 years, and when the bugs are bad here—mosquitoes, biting flies—or one of my kids is freaking out over a centipede or silverfish, I still say, "At least we don't have palmetto bugs."
posted by not that girl at 4:52 PM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


OK, this is awesome:

Each home had between 32 and 211 species, belonging to between 24 and 128 families.

A few years ago, the kids and I got a spider field guide and tried to identify all the spiders we found. It's tricky because there's a lot of in-species variability and also inter-species similarity. Some spider species can only be identified by examining their genitals under a microscope. (We didn't do this, though we have acquired a microscope since then, so. Who knows what the future holds.) It was pretty cool.
posted by not that girl at 4:56 PM on January 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


The palmetto bugs are why I just cannot imagine myself moving to FL, like, ever. My own house goes through an annual cycle of a) box elder beetles in the autumn (entertaining for the cats, and rapidly executed by yours truly, but not dangerous to household goods); b) ladybugs (ignored); and, once winter is truly underway, c) ants. We are now in the ant phase, which means occasional flurries of diatomaceous earth. I've spotted a house centipede, so there are presumably more in the basement.

About thirty years ago, my family's area of Orange County, CA would be infested every year by what we dubbed "little brown bugs." When it was little brown bug season, they got everywhere. They would show up in your shoes. In your bed. In the bathtub. In the laundry detergent. My sister and I would wail for our parents to rescue us from little brown bugs. Fast forward a decade or so, and I visited a friend in FL (where no palmetto bugs were to be seen, I hastily add). This led to the following conversation with my mother:

ME: ...oh, and I spotted some alligators. You'd see them swimming in the drainage ditches.

MOM: They let you near alligators?!

ME: We were in the car--

MOM: My child was near alligators??!!

ME: I was far from the alligators. It was no big deal.

MOM: You mean to tell me you were terrified of little brown bugs, but not of the alligators?

ME: The alligators weren't in my shoes!
posted by thomas j wise at 5:17 PM on January 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


The Palmetto bugs in Jacksonville, just off the St. John's, I looked into purchasing an AA gun.

I settled for a ping-pong paddle.

The world needs Rick Grimes.
posted by clavdivs at 5:49 PM on January 19, 2016


I do not understand the pro-centipede people at all. There is nothing—absolutely NOTHING—a centipede can kill that I cannot easily kill myself. So, why in god's name would anyone let such a motherfucking creepy creature continue to live?
posted by she's not there at 8:12 PM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ever watch praying mantises catch and eat yellow jackets? Good times, you can hear the mantises crunching them up.
posted by Oyéah at 10:03 PM on January 19, 2016


Apropos webcomic. Apparently, "Fred" is a common name for house centipedes.

When I lived in my now-former wife's farmhouse, we were often overrun by Asian lady beetles. I never saw the harm, but I was occasionally bidden to massacre a mass of them. Wasps, too, would get in and buzz around. A shot or two of Formula 409 Antibacterial Kitchen spray knocks those things out of the air dead. That stuff will even kill a cockroach.
posted by bryon at 12:03 AM on January 20, 2016


My Florida home is relatively new. And so it was manufactured to be airtight. This and the hundreds of lizards that surround us most of the year has kept the nasty bug levels down to near zero. Since I've lived here I have seen one, just one roach in the house. This was terminated with extreme prejudice. Another reason that we are relatively bug free indoors is the we do not have a basement. In NY the basement was a horror show in the summer. The house was something like 75+ years old. Lathe and plaster. Cracks and nooks everywhere. The washing machine drained into an open pipe above a trap. So we actually had a worse bug problem there. At the height of summer you didn't go down into the basement without shoes on and a weapon of some sort. And of course some of the suckers down there liked to explore. And you never neglected the ceiling check. Or you might run into the occasional drop-roach.

Here we only have the summer ant infestation and the mosquitoes. At night we happily listen to horny lizards and sing their praises. We don't even mind when they dart into the house through an open door sometimes. They are our knights in scaly armor.
posted by Splunge at 2:54 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


We had those house centipedes in Kentucky. If you spray them with bug spray, they disassemble themselves and drop all their legs. Hngnyenenuh!

They can drop their legs in the event of being attacked - the legs will continue to move for a bit, apparently as a gambit to distract a predator. I wonder if the multiple leg drop is a feature of shock or the destruction of their nervous system by the poison, or if they're interpreting it as some kind of overwhelming physical assault?

I do not understand the pro-centipede people at all. There is nothing—absolutely NOTHING—a centipede can kill that I cannot easily kill myself. So, why in god's name would anyone let such a motherfucking creepy creature continue to live?

Because they aren't going to do you any harm, and every square inch of your skin and a good portion of your house are already teeming with "gross" organisms of many kinds. Just give up and leave them alone and everyone will be much happier.

Unless they're cockroaches or silver fish and are eating your food or books, of course - then it's war.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:19 AM on January 20, 2016


Oyéah: "Ever watch praying mantises catch and eat yellow jackets? Good times, you can hear the mantises crunching them up."

Sure have. When I was a kid we had these tall flowers in the back yard. They were pink and lavender and white and they had frondy leaves. They were loved by bumblebees and praying mantises. The mantises are faster than Bruce Lee. Here is ol' bumble buzzing from flower to flower and BAM, caught. The mantis eats it alive. I do indeed remember the crunching. This is also how I found out that bumblebees are pink inside. Good times, indeed. :)
posted by Splunge at 9:43 AM on January 20, 2016


« Older tasty delicious coffee making recipes   |   the classical music of now Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments