Notice the cracked carapace.
Notice the cracked carapace.
  • Notice the cracked carapace.

Sounds like bedbugs are coming to Seattle: one friend met a formerly infested couple over the weekend and some emails going around the Seattle Housing Authority show that the city is getting more and more complaints about the little beasts.

The worst thing about bedbugs—really, the worst thing about the animal kingdom—is their habit of “traumatic insemination.” Take it away, wikipedia:

Traumatic insemination, also known as hypodermic insemination, is the mating practice in some species of invertebrates in which the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his penis and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity (hemocoel). The sperm diffuse through the female’s hemolymph, reaching the ovaries and resulting in fertilization. The process is detrimental to the female’s health.

How this process evolved according to Gilbert Waldbauer, author of Insects Through the Seasons:

This bizarre method of insemination probably evolved as male bed bugs competed with each other to place their sperm closer and closer to the mother lode of eggs, the ovaries. Some male insects evolved long penises with which they enter the vagina but bypass the female’s storage pouch and deposit their sperm further upstream close to the ovaries. A few males, notably among bed bugs, evolved traumatic insemination instead, and eventually this strange procedure became the norm among these insects

Your infested mattress is a Verdun of buggy sexual warfare.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

27 replies on “Red in Tooth and Claw and Everything Else”

  3. Uh, no. The worst thing about bedbugs is that they SUCK YOUR BLOOD WHILE YOU ARE SLEEPING.

    LIHI recently had to exterminate several of their properties- they are spreading.

  8. Octopi also do this, actually.

    Rape, so to speak, is pretty common in the animal kingdom depending on the species. Ducks often participate in it.

  11. From Wikipedia: “Traumatic insemination is not limited to male-female couplings, or even couplings of the same species. Both homosexual and inter-species traumatic inseminations have been observed.”

    Holy shit did you guys read that! Homosexual/interspecies insemination. That’s right folks a male bedbug might be inseminating a male person. Call pastor Hutch and Loveschild immediately because the gays came up with another threat against out family!

  12. Ever hear of the Monster Sex lecture up at WWU? Traumatic insemination was a hot topic during that lecture. It’s the best lecture in the coolest class available on that silly campus. Also involved in the sex lecture: Balloon orgy, and a montage of inter-species amor.

  14. Low-income people suffer from bedbugs, but the transmission is usually by high-income people, who can afford to travel. Glamor hotels all over the world are suffering from horrible bedbug infestations, in London, New York, Paris and so on. Rich people fly, and take bedbugs with them in their luggage. You won’t ever hear the W Hotel or its peers talking about bedbugs; they’d rather die than whisper it. But they’re there.

  15. they’re really really hard to kill. my dirtball ex-brotherinlaw has them in his house. my neices have to sleep in a tent set up in the living room. as soon as they leave, he stores the tent and their bedding outside. they don’t bite him as he is full of crack.

  16. Vince @13 FTMFW.

    Okay, new travel protocol for those rich enough to avoid staying with relatives but too poor to fly by private jet and to own their own condo wherever they’re going:

    1) Sleep in the bathtub in a mummy bag in whatever hotel you’re in.

    2) When you get to the airport for your return home, you step into a private (heated to 85°F) departure lounge, disrobe completely. Your clothes, luggage, and sleeping bag are taken away and either gassed, frozen, or decompressed for long enough to kill the little bloodsuckers and their eggs. After a TSA asscrack/earhole scan, you fly naked on a toasty plane with a bunch of other poor schlubs in the same sitch.

    3) At your destination, you’re either reunited with your disinfected luggage or driven home in a mirror-windowed limo with luggage to follow a week later.

  19. So does the male bedbug at least pour some wine from the two bottles in the kitchen and respect her safeword?

  22. @18: yes. at his previous house and this one, according to my sister. they hide deep, deep, DEEP in the cushions where aerosols cannot penetrate. and he’s not really a dirtball, he’s just bipolar.

  23. Diatomaceous earth is awesome stuff for dealing with bedbugs. Yeah, everything looks like you just got back from Burning Man, but oh my god it is worth it.

  24. YES! Diatomaceous earth. It can be gotten at most garden-supply stores. Check your bed very carefully, all crevices, and if that’s all clear, sprinkle the dust around the legs of your bed, around baseboards, and between your bed and anywhere the bugs might hide. The point is to make sure they have to crawl through it to get to you. If they touch it, it clings to them and dries them out. Eventually. Within two weeks from my first application, they vanished.

  25. You’re right about the DE, @24, but for the wrong reason. It doesn’t dry them out; it’s so fine that it clogs their little spiracles and they can’t respirate properly. Works on most bugs.

  26. oh, thanks for the clarification! Yes, the reason you find it at garden stores is that people often use it to get rid of aphids and such on their plants. Unlike pesticides, bugs can’t develop an immunity to it.

  27. Bedbug bites feel like they’re ON FIRE. I think I got them from the laundromat, and it is extremely hard to get rid of them. Anyone know where to find some DDT?

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