Bugged Read online

  But mosquitoes are merely one product of Oxitec’s engineered insect line. Second-order epidemics carry environmental impacts that cost hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. In mid-2015 in upstate New York, Oxitec performed caged field studies of their GM diamondback moth—an agricultural pest responsible for a huge hit to brassica vegetables. While they are good news to those who grimace at broccoli, agricultural pests are an economic detriment that encourage the use of more chemical insecticides. In fact, bug-driven plagues that threaten the environments in which we live have frequently redesigned our world.

  * * *

  Bees, fleas, and ants engulfed ancient Mediterranean cities, evicting their inhabitants. Great Gray Dart moths ravaged Greenland during Viking times. Rice fields in southern Japan faced plant hopper outbreaks in 701 CE and again a century later. Mormon cricket plagues would have run the Mormons out of Utah in 1848 were it not for “divinely inspired” seagulls, writes entomologist James Hogue, gobbling up the crickets. Vintners were in tears during the mid-nineteenth century’s Great French Wine Blight caused by the grape phylloxera. The South diversified agricultural crops in order to stay afloat due to cotton-grubbing boll weevils7 that consumed 70 percent of the harvest. (A 13-foot-tall boll weevil monument in Enterprise, Alabama, aka Weevil City, signifies the town’s shift toward agricultural variety.) Bugs, it turns out, trounce the land like invisible giants.

  Nationally, insect pests damage 10 to 25 percent of crops annually. Invasive species like the caterpillars of the aforementioned diamondback moth deliver an annual $5 billion hit. Sap-sucking Asian citrus psyllas carry a century-old pathogen known as citrus greening disease, which causes $4.5 billion losses to Florida orange farmers. Our introduction of species produces a history a ecological mortality. Toss in our ever-mercurial climate, and the epidemic outcomes can imperil habitats for centuries—even if the species are native.

  Environmental colleagues regard Jesse Logan as the “Beetle Nostradamus.” In 1994 the US Forest Service bug expert predicted the beetle epidemic that’s since decimated over 60 million acres of North American forests. The price tag for some outbreaks can reach over $50 billion of hurt to the logging industry. Look at a sweep of Rocky Mountain or British Columbia forest, and you’ll see a landscape variegation of auburn, cabernet-colored, gray, and graying conifer trees (pine, spruce, aspen, fir) touched by bark beetles. The main culprit, no larger than 5 millimeters, is Dendroctonus ponderosae. As they tunnel8 through to the nutrient-rich inner bark of the tree, aka phloem, they disperse Ophiostoma minus—a fungi stored in their mouths and under their legs, which cultivates in the wood for beetles to later munch on. The fungus rots the tree faster, staining the wood with an asphyxiated bluish hue.

  Outbreaks of this sort have been recorded for some time. By the eighteenth century, one bark beetle in particular was known as the flying worm. In botanist Friedrich Gmelin’s 1787 Abhandlung über die Wurmtroknis (Treatise on Worm Dryness), he writes that “no pests have ever done so much harm to the woodlands as has the bark beetle.” However, as one scientist found by analyzing a 250-year period of tree ring samples, such outbreaks occur every 50 years, allowing the natural character of the forest to be restored through fires fueled by a bed of dead pine needles and trees. Once cleared, more sunlight penetrates to reinvigorate the soil. But as Jesse Logan found, changes in the climate have not only caused drought stress in trees, but aided bark beetle reproduction rates, leading to invasions 10 times larger than normal. Our environment has become grossly accommodative to native beetles.

  In a 2001 paper entitled “Ghost Forests, Global Warming, and the Mountain Pine Beetle,” Logan plots a series of computer models cross-referencing the reproduction of trees, beetle developmental stages, and seasonality. For his eye-opening research, Logan largely focused on whitebark pines—said to be indicators of “a healthy ecosystem”—in the peaks of Idaho’s Railroad Ridge, which are generally safe from beetle outbreaks as they reside at 10,000 feet. But during a hike through the ridge’s Cloud Mountains, he found whitebark pines that had been invaded and killed by beetles during the 1930s, the hottest period in the United States on record—until recently. He had found a “ghost forest”—a spectral glimpse into the damage we are seeing more and more of elsewhere today. As the average global surface temperature has risen in the past 50 years by half a degree Fahrenheit, we have extended bark beetles’ reach into higher elevations and over mountain barriers. In Yellowstone National Park, bark beetles have killed 75 percent of the older whitebark pines.

  In an interview with OnEarth, Logan was asked what can be done to save the coniferous trees. His answer was anything but encouraging: “This is a natural event on the scale of Katrina. Could you build a fan big enough to blow a hurricane back out to the ocean? The scale, the speed, is just too much.” Forests have been rendered tinderboxes. According to a 2011 study, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem faces an increase in the frequency of natural fires from once every 100 to 300 years to once every 30 years. The rise in fires will deter the slow-growing whitebark pine. In his excellent book Empire of the Beetle, Andrew Nikiforuk mentions a report by the Alberta Forest Genetic Resources Council, noting “forests that evolved over thousands of years will likely disappear by 2060.” All conifer forests, as reported by the Union of Concerned Scientists, “are projected to shrink by half” in the West and down to “11 percent [of their current total] by 2100.”

  Rob Addington, a research associate at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, told me that stopping the beetle outbreak is nearly impossible and that losing various tree species is “Darwinian.” This idea of selection is echoed by several other scientists, including some who think beetles are perhaps preparing the land for a warmer climate. The problem, and perhaps solution, is that survival is an insect’s modus operandi. USDA forest researcher Constance Millar examined limber pines in the Sierra Nevada. She found that a difference in tree genes within the same species made them more or less vulnerable to warmer climates. “Interactions among genetic and environmental factors … likely preconditioned [the] vulnerability” of certain areas of limber pines. Not only were some trees stress-free, but they’d also survived beetle epidemics. In her conclusion, Millar notes: “The limber pine stands we studied are likely to persist into the future, despite the heavy mortality they experienced, even with increasing temperatures and recurring droughts.”

  Recent figures show a decline in mountain pine beetles as they’ve pigged themselves out, leaving mountains of ghost forests. In Colorado, the number of affected acres peaked at 1.2 million. By 2015, the amount of affected land had dropped to only 5,000 acres. Still, the climate change issue remains. What will be planted in the stead of ghost forests is of great interest. Meanwhile the US Forest Service scrambles to create comprehensive recovery programs, spending over $320 million in the past 10 years: thinning trees to maintain healthy ones or creating a means of pheromone disruption to keep beetles at bay. In the past 15 years, over 50 bills have been introduced to Congress about what to do, with little success. In a 2014 paper by University of Montana entomologist Diana Six, she mentions that for all our efforts, “the rate of mortality of trees was reduced only marginally.” That’s why she’s taken to studying trees that’ve endured beetle invasions—these veterans of war called “supertrees.”

  Regardless, lumber companies have found success in a shockingly aesthetic way. Demand for the reclaimed, blue-stained wood, aka “denim pine,” has become its own industry. Like some macabre reminder, you can raise pints of beer around a kill pine–paneled tasting room in Boulder’s Wild Woods Brewery. Shannon VonEschen, the proprietor of the Etsy store Twigs & Treen, carves coasters and jewelry out of local pine from these blue, tinderbox forests. Vice President Al Gore strums a beetle kill pine ukulele. Denim pine coffee tables and cabinets can sell for thousands of dollars. And in an endearingly granola fashion, people flock to carpenters at Nature’s Casket for their very eco-friendly coffins.

  Okay, rustic roo
m décor aside, you’re probably starting to really hate bugs again. Why not? They invade our terrain, our blood. Hell, insect epidemics carry such gravity as to restructure societies and affect how we live. Tit for tat, though. Fleas carry the Black Death, which historians argue was partially responsible for the Renaissance. Yellow fever ravaged the United States, but prompted new avenues in medical science. Every relationship has its downside. Yet sometimes, especially in our daily lives, that downside is simply too much to bear.

  Five

  Vámonos Pest!

  Cesar Soto DeLeon sips from a blue and white Anthora coffee cup while gesticulating with a pinched cigarette. “The thing with bedbugs is they don’t discriminate,” the pest control operator says matter-of-factly. “Number one. And number two, if you’re well off, you’re going to be in more contact with them because you travel all over the world.” The two of us stand in front of a six-story apartment complex off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Cesar is here to kill. Cesar—a 50-year-old, bullet-wounded, Bluetooth-wearing Puerto Rican and reformed ex-con who grew up in “do or die” Bed-Stuy—is one of the city’s unspoken finest. “You’re in and out of airports. You go to Africa, go to Asia, go to Mexico—”

  “And they get inside your luggage,” I say.

  “Exactly,” he says with a prolonged emphasis, his Brooklyn-native slur rendering the pronunciation “egg-xactly.” It becomes a bit of a catchphrase as we make our way inside to confront the terrorizers reigning supreme in apartment 5H.

  We are hunting for Cimex lectularius, a pest Henry Miller described as “a cosmopolitan blood-sucking wingless bug of reddish brown color and vile odor,” and whose PTSD-causing, suicide-inducing infestations earned the US pest control industry $470 million in 2014 alone. The United States has been in the midst of a resurgence since 2006. The “Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2009,”1 though not passed, was introduced in Congress by Representative G. K. Butterfield in the hopes of mandating monetarily state-assisted inspections at motels. Since 2010, advocacy groups like New York vs Bed Bugs have mapped the number of bedbug complaints2 by neighborhood. Citywide, there were 82 landlord violations in 2004. Looking at the map now, Bushwick appears as a bright red epicenter in 2010, with over 1,000 violations—a fourth of the total from all boroughs. That same year was deemed the “Year of the Bed Bug” by CBS, Brooke Borel notes in her book Infested, an account of the bedbug takeover. One artist group began placing lawn gnome–size bug hotel facades at the base of bedbug-reported buildings as a sort of hobo code to warn people. “BEDBUGS!!!,” the off-Broadway musical featuring mutant buggies and their “glam god named Cimex,” appealed to sci-fi geeks and traumatized victims while receiving positive reviews from the New York Times till it was “terminated.” The bedbug-related revenue for Brooklyn-based Northeastern Exterminating, according to an interview in trade journal Pest Control Technology,3 went from zero percent in 1994 to 76 percent in 2015.

  So when I ask Cesar, owner of insect-emancipating Freedom Pest Control, if it’s annoying to return to a complex he’s treated once before, really, it’s bittersweet.

  “Yes and no because I live off this,” he humbly admits. “Bedbug treatment: Ka-ching, ka-ching. You know what I mean?”

  As our population grows, so does the pest management industry. According to one analysis by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, service revenue in 2014 was $7.5 billion, with a five-year growth rate of 3.4 percent. So I’m not surprised to hear about Orkin’s 26,000-square-foot indoor training facility in Atlanta, replete with full-size house, restaurant, and supermarket simulations.

  What makes Cesar stand out is how he finds “spiritual” fulfillment in killing bugs and his use of an eco-friendlier method, earning him the title of pest control operator as opposed to the more derogatory sobriquet “exterminator.” Nozzle Heads. The Spray Jockeys. Rugged “therapists” to the squeamish, says entomologist Robert Snetsinger. Exterminators evoke the Wild West, or the spray gun–holstering John Goodman from Arachnophobia. For them, every bedbug bite is a victory flag for our enemies.

  As I rifle through my, ahem, vast comic book collection, I’m reminded of Simon Oliver’s Vertigo series The Exterminators, particularly the scene in which veteran spray jockey A.J. schools a newbie on the cojones required for this, our War on Bugs:

  A.J.: You gotta realize what we are, Henry.

  Henry: Pest control specialists?

  A.J.: No, what we really are.

  A.J. (cont’d): Back to the motherfuckin’ beginnin’ when that caveman reached out and fuckin’ squashed that first bug on his cave wall. It was primal instincts, them against us.

  A.J. (cont’d): And to make it as a bug brother you gotta get that primal bug juice on your hands, motherfucker … and deep down you’ve gotta get off on it.

  While synthetic chemical pesticides dominate the marketplace, swells of exterminators opt for environmentally reasonable means outlined by the integrated pest control (IPM) government policy to “minimize risks to human health and the environment.” (Look at a can of Raid Flying Insect Killer, and you’ll notice one active ingredient is d-Phenothrin—a neurotoxin that causes spina bifida and at high doses hydrocephalus—convulsion, mental disability, death.) IPM techniques might include application of a 200-year-old insecticide, the siliceous sedimentary rock known as diatomaceous earth4 (DE), steamers that heat bugs to death, or general house maintenance (repairing cracks, vacuuming, er, not kicking spilled Lucky Charms under the oven5). For instance, the poisonous gas known as methyl bromide, which has killed its share of exterminators, was used for decades to treat structural termite infestations—a $1.4 billion industry. Even though methyl bromide (also used on strawberries) was outlawed in 2005, sulfuryl fluoride, which aerates faster and leaves a smaller trace in wood, has been used as a viable alternative.

  Still, dishonest spray jockeys swindle customers by mixing potent toxins into their spray tanks. They do work, but in the process they also create more resistance.

  Cesar is a veteran bug whisperer; he started in his brother’s pest control operation around the year 2000. He’s met spray jockeys who “cut” already synthetic chemicals with the off-the-shelf concentrated stuff you buy at Home Depot. This results in clients impressed by the “instant death” delivered to said buggy assailants. And while such instant gratification might be cheaper, it becomes a recurring problem, as we’ll later see.

  The issue with the Brooklyn apartment complex Cesar is visiting again is a stubborn elderly couple who hasn’t followed his protocols. Now their opportunistic pests have trickled from their 5H apartment to residents two floors below. So, Cesar’s given the landlord a reduced price. In the past he attacked bedbugs via heat treatment—one time using up to 10 heaters in Yonkers—which can cost a couple thousand dollars. For that, pest control operators (PCOs) convert a home into a sweat lodge, hiking indoor room temperatures up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit for 6 to 12 hours.

  In the War on Bugs, a sick elation arises from witnessing the casualties bake on the battlefield. Of course, you run the risk of displacing bedbugs, which equates to more clients, more chemicals, and more revenue.

  “Your bedbug ain’t gone,” adds Cesar. “You put them in this heightened awareness.” His young assistant Orlando has closely cropped hair with stalactite sideburns. He gathers equipment from their van as Cesar finishes his cigarette. “So they’ll go dormant, for lack of a better word, for two or three weeks, and then they’re back.” Sometimes they go without food for over a year. “They never left.”

  “Right,” I agree. “They’re just hiding in—”

  “Eeegg-xactly. Floorboards, baseboards, outlets, curtains…”

  Cesar, Orlando, myself, and a metal tank of Cryonite squeeze into a tight, vintage Otis elevator with a tarnished brass door. We ascend slowly, the cables sounding as though they’re fraying apart. Cryonite is the polar opposite of heating, blasting liquid carbon dioxide at 108 degrees below zero through a goosenecked wand. According to an episode of You
Tube’s Bed Bug TV, it’s especially useful in killing eggs that won’t be easily affected by chemicals. But scroll through an online discussion board for PCOs about using steam versus Cryonite—if you have spare time for sporadic bickering—and the opinions vary.

  We exit and walk down a quiet hallway with a patterned tile floor. When we get to 3H, Cesar tells Orlando to knock on the door. A lady with an Eastern European accent answers.

  “Hello, my dear,” Cesar greets her, leisurely strolling into her living room as she chases her son down. They have packed their belongings and moved everything to the center of the room, as instructed by Cesar. “Have you had these boxes here since Friday?” he asks, concerned whether the bedbugs have hidden elsewhere besides the baseboards.

  “Yesterday I find it here,” she says. “One. Only one.”

  “Okay, can you go into the hallway and wait till we come out? Then leave for an hour and come back, okay?”

  “One hour?”

  “One hour’s fine,” he says. “We’ll open the windows so it can ventilate.”

  She switches off the Teletubbies and they leave. Cesar flicks on his inspection LED headlamp. He illuminates a couple of ink spot–sized stains in the closet space. This digested blood is frass, fecal evidence that he should also target this spot for bedbugs. Insect shit is the least interesting thing these inspections can turn up. Sometimes they reveal kilos of heroin under mattresses, cockroaches, and illegal firearms. Occasionally Cesar has to fan away wafts of cannabis smoke, fumigating bugs with a contact high. Some customers offer to trade in lieu of money in whatever business they do: photography, guitar lessons, etc. And then there are the solicitors.