"Bite like a pirate" month. (Obscure hazards of the Midwest — an occasional series.)

One of the best things about living in Colorado, or Oregon – no bugs. Well, obviously, there were insects out there, but they stayed out there, not invading the personal living spaces of their betters, e.g., me. (One thing that has always detracted from my interest in seeing Australia is the universal agreement that it's crawling with the nastiest, bitingest, stingingest bugs on earth.) We could have open, unscreened windows in Boulder or Portland, and never suffer more than shooing the occasional errant wasp out of the house.

Here, in midwestland, a different story. Not only do we have to screen out myriad species of mayflies, houseflies, horseflies, fruitflies, wasps, bees, cicadas, and hornets, we have to deal with more insidious vermin, stealth bugs so subtle, so cunning, that most people living around here don't even know they exist. (And no, they're not invisible bugs crawling all over my skin.)

The first year we lived here we had what I understand is the usual upper-midwestern summer – and extended warm and damp period, punctuated by week-long bursts of vile heat and humidity. By September, things cooled down and dried off, and the weather became quite nice, enough so that I could spend hours working in the yard without fear of heatstroke. One day, I was puttering about the garden, planting bulbs or whatnot, when I noticed a slight twinge on my arm, as though someone had poked it lightly with a needle without puncturing the skin. I didn't think much of it, and just brushed whatever it was away.

A few minutes later, I noticed another twinge, and another, and looked down at my arms to see them peppered with tiny black dots, each dot apparently corresponding with one of those twinges, which were now progressing to being painfully itchy. Hmmm. Time to go inside. Brush all the little buggers off, retreat into the house.

The litle bites became progressively itchier and itchier. As time progressed, more of them became evident, on my neck, arms,and legs, until by that evening I lay rigid in bed, unable to comfortably move in any direction without provoking an even more intolerable urge to scratch than just lying still. Having had chicken pox as a youth, I can attest that this was itchiness of the same kind and scale.

When I described these events to long-term residents, they pretty much all looked at me as though I was crazy. Tiny bugs? Incredibly itchy? Uhh..... no, Don't know what you're talking about. Moira was never affected, nor was the daughter. I just happened to be the lucky guy, alone in all of Iowa, with the major immune reaction.

Eventually, I found out who my tormentors were, thanks to ISU's extension service – minute pirate bugs ("minute" as in "tiny", not "minute" as in "minute rice"). Voracious predators of many herbivorous insects, they spend the summers in the corn and bean fields, munching away, and then in the late summer as the fields are harvested, they move on, seeking greener pastures; alas, they find only suburbia and exposed human flesh, which they spitefully attack, though it gains them naught but a curse and a squashing. Because of their role in controlling crop pests, they are considered "beneficial" (ha!) and therefore their victims are advised to hunker down and deal with it. Humans are highly variable in their reaction to the bites – it seems most people are unaffected, but an unfortunate few go into histamine overdrive. Interestingly, my reaction seems to be less severe now than it was when we moved here, which is the opposite of what I'd expect; but maybe I've just developed habits that discourage being bitten, like spending September hiding in bed.

("Minute" barely does justice to how tiny these things are – they are tiny enough to crawl through windowscreens, though thankfully they don't seem to do that much. The '1/5th inch' listed in the ISU piece is far larger than any I've seen; 1/10th to 1/16 seems more like it.)

Posted by David Fleck at 25 September 2007 06:59 AM