It’s time to bug out

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2017 (3090 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mosquito numbers have been surprisingly low, but that doesn’t mean Manitobans are enjoying a bug-free summer.

That’s especially true in the Interlake community of Gimli, where once again residents are up to their eyeballs in the annual invasion of fish flies, known to experts as mayflies.

The fishy-smelling, non-biting insects began invading Gimli earlier this month and it doesn’t take much effort to spot them lounging on beaches, piers, buildings and lampposts.

“If mosquitoes are a Winnipeg thing, then fish flies are the Interlake thing,” Gimli cottager Al Shell told this columnist. “Fish flies are just messy buggers. Last year was the worst infestation ever.

“They are attracted to lights at night, so in the morning they lie dead on the road and ground. There is a street light in front of my cottage on the boulevard. I shovelled several garbage bags of these critters. They killed the grass there. I reseeded.”

While residents are used to the annual influx, tourists are a little more creeped out by the pests, which are an important source of food for commercial fish in the lake.

The fly-infested community can take heart knowing things could always be worse, as we see from today’s creepy crawly list of The Five Most Disgusting Insect Invasions in History:

 

5) The insect invaders: Termites

The bug battleground: Northern India

Bugging off: Swarms of voracious insects can cause serious financial damage when they lay waste to valuable crops. But some pests prefer to skip farmers’ fields and head straight for the cash. That’s what happened in the northern Indian town of Arthur in 2011 when a bank was robbed by a band of unusual suspects — cash-hungry termites. According to the New York Daily News, the bad bugs ate their way through notes worth 10 million rupees — somewhere around $225,000 — when they invaded a strongroom. The Daily News states investigators were stumped as to how the tiny bank robbers sneaked into a steel chest to commit the crime on April 19, 2011. “It’s a matter of investigation how termites attacked bundles of currency notes stacked in a steel chest,” local police officer Navneet Rana told reporters at the time. Embarrassed officials with the State Bank of India confided the little culprits likely had help on the inside. “As it was the bank’s fault, it will bear the loss caused due to termites eating up the currency notes and there will be no loss to the public,” the state bank’s general manager, Abhay Singh, told the Indian Express newspaper. “The branch management has been found guilty of laxity due to which the notes were damaged by termites in the Featehpur branch of Baranki district. Action will be taken against those responsible in the matter.” The bank’s manager had earlier conceded the bank is housed in an old wood building that had been infested with termites. Sadly, this was not the first termite-related holdup. In 2008, termites in Bihar state ate a trader’s life savings stored in his bank’s safe deposit boxes. The bank put up a notice warning customers of the termites, which is not nearly as nice as getting a toaster for opening a new account.

 

4) The insect invaders: Grasshoppers

The bug battleground: Albuquerque, N.M.

Bugging off: What was that mysterious green blob that showed up around Albuquerq ue on the National Weather Service’s radar in June 2014? Initially, the weather service thought the radar was broken — until they discovered it was simply showing the worst airborne grasshopper infestation to hit the New Mexico area in 20 years. “We have actually been noticing the insects on radar since about Memorial Day,” NWS spokesman David Craft told ABC News at the time. “We have noticed the greatest impact on the radar during the evening, but they are noticeable at other times of the day, too.” Chimed in John Garlisch, extension agent at Bernailillo County Cooperative Extension Service: “It is a nuisance to people because they fly into people’s faces while walking, running and biking. They are hopping into people’s homes and garages, they splatter the windshield and car grill while driving, and they will eat people’s plants.” The biblical-style infestation was blamed on a severe winter drought. “There wasn’t enough winter to kill the egg pots,” David Richman, professor emeritus in entomology at New Mexico State University, said at the time. “Because of the dry winter, the eggs survived, hence the outbreak of grasshoppers.” The hopper invasion prompted a deluge of complaints. “Some people are freaked out about them, others fear they will bring disease, and some folks want different agencies to spray to control them,” Garlisch told ABC. Along with being gross, the swarm devoured the young tender leaves of flowers and vegetables. As with all biblical infestations, residents learned this too shall pass.

 

3) The insect invaders: The cicada

The bug battleground: The U.S. East Coast

Bugging off: They have bulging red eyes, crawl out of the earth by the billions after 17 years underground, overrun human communities, and make an ear-splitting racket as they search for sex. Sounds like a horror movie, right? Well, it’s become a reality for residents of the U.S. East Coast and Midwest, where swarms of cicadas gestate underground and emerge every 13 to 17 years to mate in local trees. While they sound ominous, they don’t pose a danger to humans or animals. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum told Britain’s The Guardian newspaper in 2013. In wingless nymph form, these one-inch bugs spend their time underground, sucking on tree roots and emerge when the ground temperature is warm enough. They spend a few weeks in the trees, then they die and their offspring go underground for 13 to 17 years. Ordinary cicadas pop up every year, but the red-eyed variety are called magiccadas and are seen only in the eastern U.S. There are 15 different broods that emerge sporadically so some area is overrun almost every year. What’s on their tiny minds when they emerge? Looking for sex, which involves the males emitting a mating call that rivals a rock concert. According to The Guardian, in 2004, scientists found cicadas can sing at 94 decibels, so deafening they can drown out planes flying overhead. How big are the infestations? Researchers say there are anywhere from 30 billion to a trillion cicadas lurking underground. For the record, 30 billion cicadas, lined up head to tail, would reach the moon and back. “There will be some places where it’s wall-to-wall cicadas,” University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp told the newspaper.

 

2) The insect invaders: Asian giant hornets

The bug battleground: Northwestern China

Bugging off: You might be prepared to stand your ground in the face of a cicada or a grasshopper, but it’s a different story when the invader is the insect equivalent of a pit bull. We’re talking here about the Asian giant hornet — Vespa mandarina — a nasty critter the size of a human thumb whose powerful venom destroys red blood cells and can result in kidney failure and death. In 2013, according to CNN, these oversized hornets killed at least 42 people and injured 1,675 — sending 206 to hospital — in three cities in Shaanxi province in northwestern China. The largest of its species in the world, the giant hornet looks like “the wasp analog of a pit bull” with “a face that looks like you just can’t reason with it,” Christopher Starr, an entomology professor at University of West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago, told CNN. These angry insects can be found throughout East and Southeast Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, India and Nepal. How big is big? News reports list them at 3.5 to 3.9 centimetres in length, and they can fly at 40 km/h and leave welts the size of bullet wounds. They produced an average of 1,000 to 2,000 offspring each breeding season and feast on other bugs, using their mandibles to sever the limbs and heads of prey. The bugs, whose venom can lead to multiple organ failure, were busy in 2013 due to unusually dry weather, and a growing number of humans moving into hornet habitat. Four years ago, they invaded schools full of children and descended on unsuspecting farm workers in China. “The hornets were horrifying,” farm worker Mu Conghui, who needed 13 dialysis treatments and 200 stitches after being attacked, told CNN. The best defence? NEVER going outside again.

 

1) The insect invaders: A plague of locusts

The bug battleground: Biblical Egypt

Bugging off: OK, what’s the first thing that pops into your head when you think about famous insect invasions? Whether you have ever read the Bible or not, when the topic turns to nasty infestations, it’s impossible not to think about the biblical plague of locusts, right? Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to think about the difference between grasshoppers and locusts. In a nutshell, locusts are related to grasshoppers and look similar, but their behaviour can turn them into something dramatically different. These paper-clip-sized pests can undergo a “gregarious phase” so that when environmental conditions produce enough green plants and promote breeding, locusts can congregate into thick, mobile, ravenous swarms. And the most famous swarm of all time came back in biblical times as one of the 10 plagues, or calamities, the Book of Exodus says God inflicted upon Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to release the Israelites. By way of biblical background, God told His prophet Moses it was time for the Hebrews to be free. Moses told Pharaoh to let them go, but Pharaoh didn’t listen, so God brought down 10 plagues. Plague No. 8 was locusts, which were said to have consumed all of the remaining Egyptian crops. To quote a modern version of Exodus: “So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts; they invaded all Egypt… They covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured all that was left after the hail — everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.” This may seem cruel, but we won’t tell you the end of the story, because some of you might want to read the book or watch Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments.

 

There’s a lot more we could say on this creepy topic, but right now we have to scream and run away, because we’re pretty sure there’s a spider the size of a canned ham lurking behind our computer. No doubt he’s got friends.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca