This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
The stories have become horribly familiar. Houses so overrun by bed bugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on the floor. An airport shutting down gates for deep cleaning after the parasites were spotted brazenly crawling around. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bed bug detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains.
For reasons that almost certainly have to do with global travel and poor pest management, bed bugs have resurfaced with a vengeance in 50 countries since the late 1990s. But recently, the resurgence has brought an added twist. When exterminators swarm out to hunt these pests, they might encounter not just one but two different kinds of bugs.
Besides the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, which has always made its home in the Northern Hemisphere, there are now sightings of its cousin, the tropical bed bug, Cimex hemipterus, in temperate regions. Traditionally, this species didn’t venture that far from the equator, write entomologists Stephen Doggett and Chow-Yang Lee in the 2023 issue of the Annual Review of Entomology. But in recent years, tropical bed bugs have turned up in the United States, Sweden, Italy, Norway, Finland, China, Japan, France, Central Europe, Spain — “even in Russia, which would have once been unthinkable,” says Lee, of the University of California, Riverside.
Like the common bed bug, the tropical version has grown resistant to many standard pesticides—to the point that some experts say they wouldn’t bother spraying should their own home become infested. It has been estimated that the fight against bed bugs is costing the United States alone $1 billion annually.
This all adds up to a sobering new reality: For many people, bed bugs are becoming a fact of life again, much as they used to be throughout humanity’s history. But as scientists race to…
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