![]() Assisted by the difference between the high pressure of the blood vessel and the low pressure of its empty body, it fills like a water balloon attached to a spigot. Unlike some insects that guzzle pooled blood, the bed bug is a bloodsucker and takes its meal from blood circulating inside a living thing. Once inside, the mouthparts restlessly seek a blood vessel. When the bed bug is ready to penetrate the skin, the toothed mandibles lead the way, snipping through like scissors to make a path for the maxillae, which follow. Within the beak are the bug’s upper and lower mouthparts-the maxillae and mandibles, respectively- each divided into right and left sides. When the bed bug finds you, it grips your skin with clawed feet and unfolds its mouth- a long tube called a proboscis, also called a beak- to probe the flesh, seeking the best place to bite. It ventures out, scurrying across the floor, up the bed legs, and across the sheets. From its hiding place in the bed- frame joint or the nightstand screw, it senses the carbon dioxide from your breath, the heat from your body, and, perhaps, some of the hundreds of other chemicals regularly emitted from your skin. It hunts down each blood meal, as entomologists call it, every few days to a week and almost exclusively at night. While a bed bug’s life may seem secret to us, it carries on the same basic routines as any other animal: it eats, seeks shelter, and has sex. You can cradle it in the palm of your hand, look into its tiny eyes, and watch it march across your mattress. Whatever the comparison, the insect is a physical being. Others offer less gruesome analogies: an adult bed bug is the size and shape of a lentil or maybe an apple seed. ![]() Some who have seen one say it resembles a drop of blood with legs. But despite the bed bug’s ability to hide and to seem invisible, it is not. This made the bed bug’s return as a real animal that takes up space in the world- our world, our beds- all the more unsettling. It became both an imaginary and an invisible threat. Somehow, although our history with this ancient pest stretches back many millennia, its brief sixty- year absence from a large swath of the world shrank our impressions of its physicality to microscopic dimensions. Their knack for concealment is why entomologists sometimes call them cryptic insects, although the uninitiated often think, incorrectly, that they’ve never seen a bed bug not because it is good at hiding but because it is invisible to the human eye. The bugs are reddish brown and flat, and are most comfortable in these tight spaces, where they spend most of their time waiting. Somewhere in that bedroom, small secretive bugs may have squeezed into a crack or hole imperceptible to your clumsy eyes: the joint of the bed frame, the head of a screw in the back of your nightstand, or perhaps a fold in the lining of the suitcase that is still sitting, unpacked, in the corner. Maybe, instead, the sheets are twisted, the blankets askew, and your jeans from yesterday are on the floor next to the hamper. Maybe the bedding is clean and crisp, a laundry-fresh comforter is tucked around the mattress, and your clothes are hidden away, neatly folded in your dresser or hanging in your closet. Excerpted from "Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over The World"
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