Bedbugs Have Been Bugging Us Since Before Beds

New research follows a distinct lineage of bedbugs that lived alongside humans for thousands of years, suggesting they might be the first human pest.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:23Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 1:30Flora Lichtman?

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

• 1:34Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna lie, they give me the ick. However, their genetics are really, really interesting.

• 1:46Flora Lichtman?

  A certain pest we love to hate. We fear them, we obsess over them, we can't resist turning them into sitcom plotlines.

• 1:56Speaker 04

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

• 2:02Speaker 05

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

• 2:10Speaker 06

  That's our trademark. Bedbug? Yes. Trademark, Billy Bedbug. Bedbugs? You expect Nora Desmond to appear in a film with a bedbug?

• 2:20Flora Lichtman?

  Simex lectilarius, the bedbug. It's almost always the villain in our narratives. But what's this little pest 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.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to talk about my research today.

• 2:52Flora Lichtman?

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

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Simex lectilarius 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.

• 3:11Flora Lichtman?

  They predate us.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  They definitely predate us.

• 3:15Flora Lichtman?

  What were they eating before they were eating us?

• 3:18Speaker 03

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

• 3:27Flora Lichtman?

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

• 3:37Speaker 03

  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 like long stabby sucky bits. 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.

• 4:02Flora Lichtman?

  When does their story begin with us?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  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, okay, 245,000 years ago, that's well before modern humans. So we're talking about early human ancestors.

• 4:33Flora Lichtman?

  So like Neanderthals and the other variants of early human ancestors too?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So one of the things we always think of with Neanderthal is, oh yeah, they were, you know, a bunch of brutes living in caves. And, um, you know, 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, you know, a subset of these bedbugs dropped from the bats onto the Neanderthals and really enjoyed the meal that they were eating off of them.

• 5:10Flora Lichtman?

  Sure, why not? I mean, the thing though is I think of bedbugs as wanting the finer things in life, like a bed. Like where did they live when they were living with early humans?

• 5:21Speaker 03

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

• 5:48Flora Lichtman?

  Have any other bugs lived with us for this long?

• 5:51Speaker 03

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

• 6:31Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, we know. Okay, so what about cities? Like, as people started forming cities, what happened to bedbugs?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so after the Neanderthals started coming out of the caves, they started intermixing with humans. And again, you know, 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're 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.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  By massive, in, you know, 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.

• 7:43Flora Lichtman?

  Do we see bedbug fossils in ancient archaeological sites?

• 7:48Speaker 03

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

• 8:00Flora Lichtman?

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

• 8:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:30Flora Lichtman?

  And what's your lab like? I mean, do you have like a closet full of bedbugs?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  We have a freezer full of bedbugs.

• 8:37Flora Lichtman?

  Someone's nightmare, your dream.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:56Flora Lichtman?

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

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they're really an interesting species to look at because they're really highly inbred.

• 9:07Flora Lichtman?

  They're highly inbred even though there's so many of them?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so your infestation, well, maybe not your personal infestation.

• 9:16Flora Lichtman?

  No, no, Lindsay, please don't tell me.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  But any given infestation is actually because it's sponsored by like one female, then you have offspring kind of 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.

• 9:50Flora Lichtman?

  How can they do that? If there's low genetic diversity, how are they good at getting mutations?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so mutations are a thing that happens in everyone's DNA all the time. Okay, and so what will happen is a random mutation can pop up. And because it is super beneficial, it will stay in a population.

• 10:12Flora Lichtman?

  So it's quantity. There's like enough bedbugs that you're gonna get some mutations.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. And because something like an insecticide resistance mutation is so beneficial, it's likely every starting kind of propagate of an infestation has that mutation. Right, it only takes one kind of really good mutation and then it can end up spreading to everything.

• 10:39Flora Lichtman?

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

• 10:41Speaker 03

  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 like, DDT is good for me.

• 10:55Flora Lichtman?

  Is it though?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  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, you know, we didn't see them in these super high frequencies. So we thought we got this. Unfortunately, we didn't get this. 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 kind of five years, those small populations become large populations.

• 11:36Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, super bedbugs, basically.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, absolute super bedbugs. And then as those populations increase, in that same timeframe, 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. 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.

• 12:17Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. You know, bedbugs are so maligned. I want to see them through your eye, stocks. Do you have a special appreciation for them?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  I really do. So I, I mean,

• 12:29Flora Lichtman?

  Make the case.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  I'm not, 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.

• 12:48Flora Lichtman?

  You know, it feels to me kind of insane to call them bedbugs since, you know, they had a whole life before beds.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  They sure did.

• 12:56Flora Lichtman?

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

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, like tiny bloodsuckers.

• 13:04Flora Lichtman?

  Bloodbugs.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Bloodbugs, yep.

• 13:06Flora Lichtman?

  Should we mount a campaign with our listeners?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  I think, I think so.

• 13:10Flora Lichtman?

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

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure.

• 13:27Flora 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.

• 13:53Flora Lichtman?

  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 cop prey with their butts.

• 14:03Speaker 07

  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.

• 14:15Flora Lichtman?

  Don't go away.

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• 16:57Flora 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 tuchus flytrap. And then, once the wasp had its brain 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 Villemsen, curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Welcome to Science Friday, Lars.

• 17:32Speaker 07

  Thank you very much.

• 17:33Flora Lichtman?

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

• 17:37Speaker 07

  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.

• 17:51Flora Lichtman?

  Myanmar amber.

• 17:53Speaker 07

  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.

• 18:08Flora Lichtman?

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

• 18:13Speaker 07

  That's what we write in the paper, so that's how we imagine that this could have happened.

• 18:18Flora Lichtman?

  I'm certain you didn't use the term butt flaps in the paper.

• 18:21Speaker 07

  No, we're talking about abdominal flaps, sixth and the seventh segment of the abdomen of the wasp.

• 18:28Flora Lichtman?

  And how do they seem to work? Are they triggered mechanically? Like, how do they actually trap a victim?

• 18:35Speaker 07

  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 in ambush with the trap open. And on the edge of the lower flap of the trap, there's very elongate hairs extending fan-like. And we imagine these served as trigger hairs.

• 18:56Flora Lichtman?

  And this is how a Venus flytrap works, right? The trigger hairs.

• 19:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, more or less. I mean, in a Venus flytrap, 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.

• 19:28Flora Lichtman?

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

• 19:37Speaker 07

  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, some, some kind of deformation of the specimen, which is not uncommon.

• 19:50Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, like you didn't even think it was real?

• 19:52Speaker 07

  No, not, not at first glance. And, and as, as, as far as we know, I mean, you, you can never know for certain what an extinct organism lived like. I mean, how, how, how it, it used its, its anatomical features to go around its, its daily life. So, so what you do, you compare with organisms living today and the further back we go in time, the, the more weird insect life becomes and the, the further we have to look for, for, for modern parallels. In this case, we had to go outside the, the animal kingdom to find something that we, we thought resembled what we were looking at.

• 20:31Flora 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.

• 20:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, for, for sure. And, and this is, I mean, it, it's very unusual for, for me to have a paper getting so much attention. This has never happened to me before. So, so, so I, I, I, 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 be, before humans. I mean, they have invented agriculture. You have leaf cutter ants doing that. And yeah, I mean, a, a, almost everything you could think of.

• 21:12Flora Lichtman?

  What's this wasp's name? So we know what to call it in our nightmares.

• 21:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, it's Sirenobetelus caruptis. And, and this, this is a fancy name, of course. I mean, caruptis refers to a monster in ancient Greek mythology, which, which almost swallowed Odysseus when, when he was traveling the world. And yeah, Sirenobetelus, I mean, a siren was also a, a monster that lured sailors to, to their deaths. But, but it, it's also because there, there, there's a group of mammals, sea cows. Manatees and the tail of a manatee in outline actually looks like

• 21:59Speaker 07

  the flap of this wasp also. So that was another reason to name this a species like this.

• 22:05Flora Lichtman?

  I love it. Thank you, Lars.

• 22:07Speaker 07

  You're welcome. Thank you.

• 22:08Flora Lichtman?

  Lars Villemsen, curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

• 22:17Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us wherever you listen, but only if you like the show. It really does help us get the word out and get the show in front of new listeners. Today's episode was produced by Shoshana Buxbaum. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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