9UNP0437SD_Phil_Pellitteri

- Cassie Immel: Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Tonight, we have Phil Pellitteri. He's with the Insect Diagnostic Lab. He's talking about "Wisconsin's Changing Insects: A View from the Diagnostic Lab." He's a distinguished faculty associate with the Department of entomology, and has run the Insect Diagnostic Lab since May, 1978. He's also an Extension entomologist, and gives 40 to 50 talks and workshops around the state every year. Phil is on Public Radio and teaches in the Farm and Industry Short Course, and on the UW-Madison campuses. I present to you, Mr. Phil Pellitteri.
(applause)

- Phil Pellitteri: Thank you. Tonight, I'm going to try to share with you, probably what excites me more than anything else in running the Diagnostic Lab. And that's just the kind of changing world of insects. And I have a couple three opinions I formulated over the years, so you have to kind of bear with me on these things. I am fortunate enough to be a native Madisonian. I got my degrees here. But I will tell you, when I came to this university, I had no intention of becoming an entomologist. I wanted to become a wildlife biologist. And after the first semester, finding that there were far more students than there were jobs, I switched to biochemistry, and had a real interest in going to medical school. 

And I took a course in entomology just for fun. And I have been in the department ever since. So, I really find it quite a blessing. Because sometimes it's kind of hard to see. And when you talk to young people that are interested in science and where it's all going to lead, you kind of say, don't worry about it. Things kind of, in many cases, evolve. I was hired at a three-month appointment to run the Diagnostic Lab when it was originally started by Dr. Chuck Koval. And the idea behind it was, many of my Extension colleagues were on the road in the summer. And that's exactly when the inquiries would come in. 

When you send an insect in the mail, and it sits for ten days before somebody can get an opportunity to look at it, it's often not in suitable condition. We're a back-up to the County Extension offices, of which we have 72 counties. We don't have quite that many offices in this state. And aside from handling just the identification, I handle somewhere between 5,000

- 6,000 people contacts. And it's kind of fun to see how things, even in the recent past, has changed. This is a summary from 2000. And the samples are about right. The number of phone calls had been declining to some degree, but we'll explain that in a second what's going on there. And by default, I get a lot of media contacts, both because I've been around so long, and generally with everybody else being gone, when the call comes in, by default, Phil gets it. 

That's how it goes. Now, looking from 2000-2008, the number of samples have not changed. But I will tell you now, about 40% of what I process are digital images of critters that people have taken in their backyard, or a county office has taken into their lab and sent to me. And I can handle at least about 95% of them. So that's been really quite a change. It's also interesting now that people in the past would not have went through the bother of sending them in. But when they see something real interesting, it's not hard to send an email. And you can see that my phone calls went down, but my emails are constantly expanding, which is just fine. Media goes hot and cold depending on how the insects behave. If we have a bad mosquito year, I know I'm going to be talking a lot, even though, you know, my take on mosquitoes, it's very easy to predict them. 

If it rains hard, we get mosquitoes. If it's a dry year, we don't. And that's the simple fact of the matter. It's about a ten-day process in the summer from a flooding rain to a hatch of mosquitoes. The other thing of course, the Web. I have a couple three components on my Web site. And we find that that gets some pretty good traffic. And so, that really is kind of fun to work with. So as I said, people send me all kinds of interesting samples. I'm never quite sure what's going to come in the door. 

But this is a way for us to kind of get an idea of the pulse of what kind of things are coming on. There is not a year that goes by that I don't get exposed to things that I have not seen before. And even at times, things we find in the lab that have not been found in the country before, and those are always quite interesting. And as I mentioned, digital images. This was an image shared with me this past March from somebody. Have you ever heard of the term snow flea? They are technically, to entomologists, a little creature called a springtail. And there are some dark black species that often emerge in March and April, sometimes as early as February if the weather is right. They get the name snow flea from the fact that they jump. But what's interesting in this phenomena is the sheer masses of numbers that you can see. 

And here just gives you an idea. These things are only about a millimeter and a half in size. And sometimes, you can see them three or four inches deep around tree trunks and other things in the early spring, when there's still some snow on the ground. I'm constantly getting exposed to things. I never would've thought I saw scorpions sent into the lab when you live in Wisconsin. Maybe Arizona you'd expect it. But I will tell you, I've processed a number of different scorpion samples. This one came out of a computer box down in Lake Geneva. And the person had come into the emergency room after being zipped by the scorpion. Not a pleasant experience, but maybe not quite as dangerous as sometimes the TV shows will lead you to believe. 

This is another one I like. It's kind of an interesting one. This came to me from a gentleman in the Cambridge area. His complaint is when he went to walk his dog, the deer flies were just driving him crazy. And deer flies, really, are very difficult to manipulate, because they breed in swamps. They're strong flying insects. There really is not a whole lot you can do. But I did share with him an old USDA trap design, that they're attracted to shiny, moving objects. And I talked about some experiments that had been done down in Georgia, and whatnot. So what he came up with is a plastic flower pot that he covered with a sticky material. 

And he put this on his head. And as he walked, he caught all these flies. 

(laughter)

 And I won't say this is a quite a fashion statement, but really, it was quite an ingenious way of going about it. And he was just delighted with the results. So, it's kind of fun, sometimes, the things you see. Now, you may have heard me mention before, if you've ever heard me on Public Radio. I've come to this theory about eight or nine years ago, that the governor moved us to Missouri and didn't tell us. Because one of the unique things that I have witnessed in my career is the number of insects that have extended their range drastically northward. And insects that typically we would find in central Illinois when I started over 30 years ago, are now showing up in Wisconsin Dells. 

This is one of the examples I share with people. This is called the Imperial moth. The host plant of this insect are oak trees. And we've got plenty of oak trees. But the argument always was its over-wintering stage, which is in the soil, couldn't survive real cold temperatures. And as a kid, I will tell you, I would've given you my bike, or my sister, for one of these. You just didn't see them. Just occasionally, there are records. Every year now, I see samples from the southern third of the state, or so, in various places. So, we really have the strong opinion that these things have established again. 

And if anything, probably equate it with the lack of really severe cold in the winters. Another example of that is the Praying Mantis. There are no native mantis to Wisconsin. In fact, the mantis that you often see in pictures, and you can buy these egg cases in the gardening catalogs are either the European mantis, which is a European species, of course, or the Chinese mantis. And they're really stunning insects. The only way you could get them in the past is to order one of these egg masses, put it out in your backyard and they'd hatch. The mantis dispersed, and then through the season, they mature. And in the fall of the year, they will lay another egg mass. And if you've ever seen one, it looks like a golf ball. But it's very light and foamy in appearance. 

And this was always the life stage that we thought was susceptible to the cold weather, and wouldn't survive. So, even if you had mantis there, they just didn't seem to make it through the winter. Well, we are convinced now that we have mantis breeding in the southern two tiers of counties. And again, we equate this with a lack of very cold weather. This is kind of fun to watch. They're neat insects. They're big and showy. Great for children to watch. Sometimes, I guess, I would say entomologists have been guilty of overstating their benefit. They do eat things. 

But they'd eat a honey bee as well as a grasshopper. And they won't waste their time on little aphids on your rose plant. So, they're not going to control all the problems in the backyard. On the other hand, as I said, they're really kind of fun to watch and just see how they thrive. And they will help out to some degree. Another example, and you may have experienced one of these. This, I would describe as the largest yellow jacket you have ever seen. But it's not a true yellow jacket. The critter is called a cicada killer. And again, my colleague Dave Hogg, who went to school in Purdue, used to tell me how common these were down in Indianapolis. 

We would never see cicada killers. They show up about the end of July. The wasp is about three inches long. And what it does, is it goes out and hunts the cicadas. Those are the things that hum in the trees in July and August. It stings it and paralyzes it. And then, it digs a burrow and puts the cicada in there, lays an egg. Then it has nothing to do with the raising of its young. So we call these types of things solitary wasps, which is different from the things that make the big colonies, and we have queens and lots of workers. If I want to find cicada killers now, I can go over to University Hospital. 

I can go over to Bascom Hall. Any place we have open, bare soil, these things are quite common in Madison. And as I said, as I get records, because people who have not experienced these things tend to send them in to the university to see what they are. We have records up in Wisconsin Dells now, north of Milwaukee. So, they're distributing in the southern part of the state. And again, one would just speculate that it has to do with milder winter conditions. This one's a little bit different. This little caterpillar is found, very typically, on burning bush and other plants in the genus Euonymus. And we call it Euonymus caterpillar. It might remind you a little bit of Tent caterpillar, because it does construct a webbing type structure about the same time of the year. 

But they're little yellow worms with little black dots on them. And this is a European species that we first intercepted in the late 1980s in Waukesha and Milwaukee. And we would find that it would extend its range for a year or two and then get knocked back. What seemed to be the critical factor is, again, winter temperature. The reason for this, this caterpillar over-winters its very tiny larvae on the plant. And so, they're in a quite susceptible stage. And if we would get a 20-25 below, it really could not survive. But if we had a succession of two or three winters, it would expand. So we've seen it in the Madison area. It's gotten over into Green County and the far western part of the state. 

And the farthest north I've really ever seen it was up in the Dells area. And sometimes the population can be quite dramatic. This is a bush that was located up on University Avenue at the Wisconsin Academy of Art and Science building. And it looks like the kids have been out there with that Halloween fake spider webbing. But this is really larvae. And when you look up close, the sheer numbers of them are staggering. But as I said, my experience with it is it would ebb and flow in the southern third of the state. This picture of a burning bush hedge was sent to me from Duluth about three years ago. And they seem to be very successful up there. And of course, the Superior and Duluth climate is about as extreme as we get in this state. 

And so, to me, this is just another grand example of range extension associated with just a somewhat milder climate. Now, this little critter. Probably the most hated insect in the state. That used to be the European earwig. But this thing, I think, has surpassed it. Officially, we call this the multi-colored Asian lady beetle. Some people say it's the thing that looks like a lady beetle. It is a true species Coccinellidae. It is from Asia. It gets the name, multi-colored, because it is quite variable. 

The classic one has 16 dots on the back, but you can find forms that have 14 dots, and some that lack any black markings. And there's even a form you would run into that is black with two red dots, and it's the same species. So they really are quite variable. And what's interesting, is this insect appeared, for the first time in the United States, in 1989, down in Louisiana. And our first records in Wisconsin are in 1993, when one of our graduate students picked it up in a prairie project he was doing in Grant County. Those dates are really quite significant. Because a number of times between 1920 and the early 1980s, the USDA released this insect on purpose to control various pest species of insects, including pecan aphid down in Georgia. That was really the last releases. But from that last release in the early '80s, there was never any records of establishment. So you tried to get it to do what you wanted it to, and it wouldn't. 

And then all of a sudden, it shows on its own a few years later, two or three states over, which one would guess, and it is a guess, that this insect was hitch hiking on a ship or something, came into the Port of New Orleans and spread from there. But whatever was going with that population, they were very successful. Within four years, we found them in Wisconsin. Now, part of the biggest claim to fame is this phenomena in the fall of the year that they swarm in mass attack, homes and structures that are exposed. And what they are doing is looking for over-wintering sites. Because they spend the winter as adults. And a couple fascinating things about their biology is we know that individual adults can live up to three years, which is really quite phenomenal for an insect, to begin with. And then secondly, we used to think there was some kind of interesting chemical cues that caused them all to congregate, because that's quite common with insects with pheromones, and the like. But it turns out, these things are visual beasts. And what they are attracted to is contrasting light. 

And so, what you will find first of all, the trigger to get Asian lady beetles to start their invasion is the first hard freeze. You never see them try to come in before this happens. But then, after that first hard freeze, you get that beautiful Indian Summer day, sometime in October, it can be very early, late, just depending on when the freeze comes. If you've ever been out in the country and they are moving, it's like being in a honey bee yard. There are just millions of beetles flying every which direction. But you'll notice that they'll congregate on the sunny sides, usually the south and the west side of a structure. And given the opportunity, they will crawl into any cracks or crevices they can. Once they do that, if you're unfortunate to have that to be your home, you will be seeing Asian lady beetles all winter long. So, every time you get a warm day, a couple will wake up and come into the living structure. They don't survive very long. 

And so, that creates quite a nuisance. One of the other very interesting things that make them somewhat different than our 40 or 45 species of native lady beetles in this state is that in the fall of the year, one of the phenomena you might have experienced out in the garden is that they bite. And normal lady beetles don't bite. And that's really kind of a strange thing. And honestly, it's not so much that they're taking a malicious attack on humans, but honestly, we think they are so famished at that time of the year that they're tasting whatever they're on. And if that happens to be you, you get this little pinch. But the other phenomena we see, even though lady beetles by nature feed on aphids and other insects, in the fall of the year, they get desperate enough to feed on high sugared fruit. And so, in this case, you see that they are causing damage on this apple. They will not damage an intact fruit. But once it's been opened up and bruised in any form, they go after it. 

We have quite a difficult time also in grape growing. And it isn't so much the damage they cause to the grapes, but you might've experienced this phenomena, if you crush a lady beetle, you get this very strong smelling liquid. In fact, you don't even have to crush them. If you just bother them a little bit, a defensive mechanism of lady beetles is they bleed through their joints. We call this reflex bleeding. And their body fluids are made to be very strong smelling and repelling. So that's why predators leave them alone for the most part. And so, the problem is when you harvest them with the grapes, and then you crush the grapes to make wine, it grossly affects the taste. And it's not a pleasant taste. So that's not good. 

Another problem with this as presented, is this body fluid contains lots of proteins. And we have people who, in their homes, are getting these proteins found, you know, left in many places, and they're becoming allergic to it. And so, this has caused even some human health issues. You know, asthma-type problems and other kinds of things that you would normally associate. So, a very interesting insect. The trouble is that the common theory is that these were introduced to control soybean aphid. Now, a couple other things going on. This is an interesting one. A gentleman over in the Dodgeville area shared these pictures with me. He was re-siding his house. 

And his claim is that the dead bodies literally caused his siding to rot. And there must've been some kind of problem with just air flow. I didn't believe him. But after seeing the pictures, there definitely is a very close relationship with the wood starting to go out of condition and the populations. One of the other phenomena that we run into is furnace failure because of lady beetles. Because they're looking for any kind of shelter, we find that they can pack themselves in the ventilation tubing and whatnot of these things. And if enough of that happens, it clogs it. So again, we've had to take that into consideration. It's as simple as putting a screen, so we can still get the air flow, but yet insects can't crawl through. This thing has really started a whole bunch of problems that we normally don't associate with it. 

But I will tell you, interestingly enough, probably the first time the numbers really got out of hand was in '95, where I'd get calls from people about these swarms of insects, and my white house is orange. They weren't exaggerating. It really does get that bad. But I will tell you that in the last four or five years, we have seen a moderate drop in the population. That is kind of a common phenomenon you see with invasive insects. The first two or three years that they establish their populations seem to be most dramatic. Then, over time, they maybe won't balance to the point where we would like them to, but they start to slow down. And of course, my comment to people who have an old farm house that used to have 200,000, and I say, well, they're down by 60%. You still have a few thousand insects in the house. You tend not to be happy. 

But at least there have been some changes with this. The soybean aphid thing is interesting because the phenomena here is, the soybean aphid was discovered for the first time in the United States in 2000, in Lake Geneva, in Walworth County. And so, the lady beetle was here, really, 11 years before the soybean aphid showed up. This is also an interesting story. Disappointing, because this is the first major soybean insect that we have in the United States. It is from China. Its major predator in China, and here in the United States is the Asian lady beetle. So they do flourish off this. But the correlation-- Yes? Where's the aphid? 

Aphids are best described as plant lice. If you look on the underside of the leaves, there are these little, tiny green critters. And those are the adult aphids. Aphids are amazing animals. They are kind of the champion breeders of the insect world. Most aphids go through 10-14 generations. And the two phenomena that make them really quite unique is they tend to not lay eggs in the summer. They give birth to live young. That's a way of shortening their life cycle, because of course, eggs take time to hatch. The other interesting phenomena with many species of aphids is that they're all females in the summer. 

They're giving birth to daughters without mating. Which again, is a way of shortening your life cycle, because if you have to find a male and develop a relationship, that all extends things out. So we find that very warm summer temperatures, aphids are turning cycles in five to seven days. So, as I said, as you hear this thing that these were brought in, it was partially true, but that doesn't seem to be what the science would suggest as far as its establishment throughout the whole United States. The only place you don't see multi-colored Asian lady beetles is in the Rocky Mountains. I will also tell you, this impacted our native species. They have competitively displaced many of our species, so that's kind of unfortunate. This little creature is a deer tick. And I will tell you, as a student, it was quite interesting to hear about Malaria, and all these exotic diseases, but when I found out I'd be working in Wisconsin, I really didn't think I'd have much of an opportunity to see an arthropod-borne disease. And at the time, Lyme disease was here, we just didn't know what Lyme disease was. 

And the culprit here is a little tick. And our first record of this tick goes back to 1969, when a graduate student was doing work on mouse parasites throughout Wisconsin. But he found this tick on a mouse up in Spooner, which is up in the northwest part of the state. And he published a paper on it, because the tick was way out of place. The normal range for this tick at that time was thought to be Texas. They called it the blacklegged tick down there. And just in comparison, the left side here is the adult female deer tick, whereas the one on the right is what we normally would call the wood tick, if you grew up here. But technically, to an entomologist, it is the American dog tick. Now, one of the differences in the markings of these is that the American dog tick has this whitish or silverish marking on its back. It's almost like you took a paintbrush and just, in some cases, put a lot or a little. 

It's always there. The only light marking that you see here on the back of this deer tick is a reflection from the light of my microscope. The tick is somewhat smaller, but sometimes people exaggerate on how small it really is. This is just the underside of the tick. Notice it has a very orange-red abdomen in the adult female stage. That's also really quite distinctive, if you've ever run into it. And the interesting thing about Lyme disease is the two centers for Lyme disease basically are on the east coast, around Connecticut, and now spreading through a number of the states there. And Wisconsin is the focal point in the Midwest. And from the original area in Spooner, historically, the highest populations of deer ticks have been found in the northwest, central, and now southwest part of the state. Now, we've been tracking this thing for over 40 years. 

And still, for the most part, the tick is quite infrequently found on the east side of the state. But I will tell you that's starting to change. We're picking populations up in Sheboygan. We also have a very interesting one we're watching around the Lake Geneva area, Walworth County and the Kettle Moraine Forest. Now, a little bit about Lyme disease. If you look at the number of cases of it, it continues to climb. Over 2,000 cases in 2008. The summaries aren't here for 2009. I know it's over that. If we go back to, even 2005, it was only 1,400 cases. 

And one of the things, as we look into it, we can look at the tick to see what percentage of the ticks are carrying the organism that causes this. It's a corkscrew-like bacteria. And typically, it runs a little under one in five, so about 18% would be the normal. And there are some places we've found it as light as one or two percent. But my colleagues, Susan Paskewitz, who's our medical entomologist, and Dr. Ken Raffa, who is our forest entomologist, have been doing a project on a couple sites. One is in Spring Green. The ticks have always been there. But they were working in the Kettle Moraine, where the ticks have really only been found for about the last five or six years. And they've been studying a phenomena called red pine decline, where we get these mature stands of red pine, and trees start to die. 

When they die, it kind of moves out like a donut. And so, what happens, you've got declining trees on the edge, but in the center, the trees die. And all of a sudden, we open up the understory, the sunlight gets to it, and you get all kinds of raspberries and all kinds of undergrowth. Ticks love that. So you walk in the mature pine forest, you can't find any ticks. But you get into this area with the raspberries and whatnot, the ticks are quite frequent. So they thought this was a perfect study to study the establishment of a tick in an environment. And that's what they're finding. The tick numbers are very high. But really, what's got us quite unsettled is they're finding the infectivity of those ticks is 80%. 

Four out of five, which is really very fascinating. And we're asking the question why. And we've got a couple theories, but we're not quite there in understanding what's up completely with that. The ticks themselves, you have to admire, whether we're talking the American dog tick or deer ticks, it's a two-year lifecycle. And they only feed three times in that two years. And it can probably even extend a little longer than that if they don't find a meal. They must find a host and suck the blood. This takes somewhere between two to five days when they do it. When the tick bites you, you get, in the case of a deer tick, a pretty impressive wound. This one happened to be on the left side of my own person. 

And I didn't see it right away, because I'm just getting round enough that I didn't quite get an idea of what was on the belt line. This is not Lyme. This here is just purely my body's reaction to the tick bite. And I describe it as if somebody poked you with a pencil quite deeply, as you can see, because there's quite a bit of bruising. One of the phenomena that you see quite commonly in Lyme, but it's not a hundred percent is a skin rash that gets quite large, four to five centimeters. And it starts to spread over time. It reminds me a little bit of a heat rash. Sometimes, people will describe it as bullseye because it's got a clear center and more defined edges, but not always. But then the other problems, body aches and fevers, you know, almost reminding you of some kind of flu. Then, if untreated, there are some major complications, arthritis, neurological, associated with Lyme disease. 

So it's something you really want to keep a hold of. Now, the thing that we found with this tick is that it really does not do well in urban settings. You know, in fact, it really doesn't do well in places you might think it would, like the Arboretum. I have seen one deer tick in my career out at the Arboretum. On the other hand, if you go to the western edge of the state, to Governor Dodge, and you get into the forested situations, where there's a lot of raspberries and understory, I can pick up 50 ticks in an hour without any problem. So, it's very much localized. But when you do find these environments, they're really quite common. Three life stages to the tick. The first life stage is called the larva. They're extremely tiny. 

And I will tell you, the larvae are of no concern to people, because they do not carry the disease. I don't know how I found this. But this is a larva tick on my own person. Entomologists like to do experiments on themselves. And this happens to be the case. And what I found is there was a mole that had very tiny little legs when I put it under the scope. 

(laughter)

 The stage that is more of concern is the nymphal stage. This is the second stage. After the larvae is fed, it drops off the host, transforms into the nymph, and then has to wait for the next host to come by. 

The nymph is most prevalent in the middle of the summer. We find probably from maybe the first of June would be reasonable. I see a couple nymphs now up until mid-September. And if you grew up here, wood ticks, usually by the first of July, we're out of the tick season, you don't worry about them. They're more of kind of an early summer, late spring problem. Deer ticks are present in one life stage or another. If there's no snow on the ground, there'll be deer ticks out there. And we know that most humans get the disease from the nymphs, because the correlation of when people get sick versus when the life stages are out there. This is a nymphal tick. And you can see, that's on my fingernail. 

So they are really quite small. And the culprit here is that Lyme disease, plus at least two other diseases called Babesiosis and the other called Human Anaplasmosis are most diseases that the deer tick picks up and bridges to people. In fact, I will tell you there may be four diseases. My colleague Susan Paskewitz is talking about a new anaplasmosis we're finding up in the Eau Claire area that doesn't really have a name yet. But we're strongly suspicious that the deer tick is the culprit in every one of these cases. And what it does, it acquires it when it feeds on the mouse. That's why the larvae is not carrying disease, because it hasn't fed yet. It hasn't had the opportunity. It picks up the disease after the first feeding. And then, anything it feeds on after that point, it can transform. 

So what you see is an infectivity level that doubles when you go from the nymphal stage to the adult stage, because they've had two opportunities to acquire rather than one. So it really fits quite well with the biology of the creature. And you kind of wonder what we're finding in other parts of the country, is other diseases. There's one associated with a Lone Star tick down in Missouri, which is very much like Lyme, but not quite the same. The mouse disease just happens to be a different tick bridge. The interesting thing, though is our wood tick is not capable of transmitting Lyme. You can't get it to do it in a laboratory no matter how hard you try, which is good, because we would have even more cases. Now, if you've ever had a tick on your person, you find they're rather difficult to remove. Well, this is the mouth part of a tick. And it reminds me of a barbed fish hook. 

It really is a thumb-like structure with these barbs on it. And what the deer tick does, which is different than what a wood tick does when it feeds, is it cements this in. On top of being barbed, it is glued into your person. Now, you've heard us talk about Lyme disease. We will tell you that if you remove a tick in 36 hours or less, from the time it got on you, whether it's carrying the disease or not, you will not get Lyme. Because in that first 36 hours, that tick is not feeding, it's setting up the housekeeping with this mouth part, getting it put in, getting it glued in. Then, when everything is all set up, they start to pump salivary components, and that's how the bacteria gets into your system. That's why we talk so much about doing tick checks when you're in tick areas. And one of the first and best preventatives is to get the ticks removed very early. But I thought this, again, would show you why, when people say it's so difficult to pull those things out, yes it is. 

In fact, quite commonly, when people pull, they will snap this off. You don't get Lyme from that, but it's like having a sliver. There's a chance of getting a secondary infection, so that's probably the biggest concern with that. This isn't a tick. This is a bed bug. I will tell you, professionally, right now, this little beast is causing more problems than anything I have seen in my career. You've probably seen articles in the New York Times, and on national news, and the like. I thought I'd share with you just a little bit of what we're starting to watch evolve. Bed bugs, in some sense, are indoor mosquitoes. They're obligatory blood feeding animals. 

And they are very host specific in this case. The human bed bug, although it can feed on pets and whatnot, it does not thrive on them. And you know, I tell the stories, as far as human bed bugs, early in my career, I would see maybe one case every 18 months. And I would get so excited, I would go out to the secretaries and do show and tell. Because, again, it was really unique. Now, I can go through a week and see 8-10 cases in one form or another. This is a close-up of the beast. It reminds me, it's kind of shaped like a sesame seed, maybe about the same size. The color will depend a little bit on its feeding status. They're kind of this dark chestnut brown. 

If they're fed on blood, three or four days later, they almost get a blackish appearance. If they're unfed, they almost have a bit of a yellowish appearance to them. And this is just some figures out of New York. New York is the bed bug capital of the United States right now, although Cleveland is a close second. And I will tell you, that although my numbers aren't that high, this is kind of the way I am witnessing it in most areas that I know of. The number of cases have really, absolutely exploded. Bed bugs were a common issue until the 1940s. DDT, honestly, was so effective against them, that it took it off the table for about five decades. So, most of us grew up without being exposed to bed bugs. That's why I have people tell me they don't exist, it's an urban legend, and you know, other than the little poem we all said when we were a kid, people had no idea until the last four or five years when things have all of a sudden changed. 

My definition of making the big time with insects, is they name candy after them. And they have done it with bed bugs. Now, there are others. Historically, the most common bed bugs I see before the human bed bug explosion, there's a species associated with bats. And this may seem subtle, but these are the kind of things we used to tell apart. Bat bugs have very long bristly hairs on their body. In fact, the character we use to separate them from human bed bugs is, the hairs are longer than the width of the eye of the insect. And you can see this on this one. This is a species associated with bats. It will bite humans, but it will not breed in your bedroom. 

It will not be able to reproduce off of human blood. The human bed bug, there are really technically two species. A tropical species and the species we find in the north. We think they evolved from bat bugs when our ancestors lived in caves in northern Europe. And you can see very easily, if a new host is there, some of the bed bugs evolved to take advantage of the new host. So, that's what we think has happened. They've been associated, you can go back in time, bed bugs were known. But bed bugs were a non-issue in the United States until the Europeans started to settle. They were not found with our First Nation or Native American peoples. The female here has laid a group of eggs. 

The eggs are very small, but they remind me of little rice grains. I did bring some samples of these. After we're all done, you know, if you want to see, I can share some of this with you. The bites are very mosquito bite like. Although about 30% of us do not respond to the bites. I'm one of those persons. I will allow them to bite me, and I don't even get a pink spot. And there's also a delay, sometimes as much as 24-36 hours before you react. And we all differ a little bit. In this case, you can see quite clearly in the center of these little red marks, the puncture wound. 

But that is often not the case. So it's kind of mysterious. And we all wake up in the morning at times with occasional bites. But when bed bugs are really numerous, the bites really are very numerous and easy to see. The giveaway for finding bed bugs is to look for the signs of their presence. And probably the easiest sign is the waste that they leave behind. And the first bed bug samples I would see come in, came in from very nice hotels, you know. And we'd say, well this is people traveling around and bringing them in that way. Then it started to evolve into multi-family housing, student housing. And one of the problems we see there, is they can spread quite easily from unit to unit. 

This is a close-up of a mattress. These little black stains here are the digested blood that they have left behind. And they're also right here. Along the seam is where the bed bugs hide during the day. There' three here, and there's one up in the little crevice closer to my thumb. This happens to be a headboard from a bed. I can see the eggs laid in the places. Typically, you'd find them along the cracks and crevices. Bed bugs love wood. If I were to look for them in any place, I look for the first wood structure, whether it's the headboard, or quite commonly, when I'm staying in a motel, I will look on the picture frame. 

That's often made of wood. They just like that structure. There are some cast skins. Insects, as they grow, leave their molted skin behind. Then I can see the little black waste pellets to tell me that the bed bugs have been present. Those are probably the easiest things to find, if you're in an environment, and you're wondering, indeed, are their bed bugs present. Here's another close-up. It turns out that 70% of the population will associate with the bed frame, the mattress and the box spring. Well, that makes a lot of sense, because that's where people are most likely to be. But the other 30% can be found anywhere in the room, which is one of the things which has been quite problematic. 

Here, we see a close-up again of lots of bed bugs, a lot of their waste. And common place to find them is on the box spring, where that little plastic corner protector is. They seem to like that interface between the plastic and the fabric. So again, that's a good place to look for them if you're suspicious that you have activity. Now, this issue has become worldwide. I remember back in 2006, at our national meetings, there were three papers on bed bugs. In 2007, there were 33. So, that tells you it's getting on the radar screen. And the main reason for this, honestly, is insecticide resistance. The common chemicals that we are using against bed bugs, the resistance factor is 2500-fold. 

So, it used to be one teaspoon to a gallon to kill the insect. It's now 2500 teaspoons to a gallon, which of course, doesn't make sense. But the chemicals are basically very ineffective. And so, the treatments that should work, don't. And because they don't work, they spread. They aren't the easiest things to find. But the other thing is the cost of treating. If you have a bed bug problem, the cost will run between $800 and $1500 to have a treatment done. And because of that, landlords and individuals aren't getting the treatments done timely, and that just allows the bed bugs to go and continue to spread. They aren't the easiest things to monitor when their numbers are low. 

And you might see now, the popularity of bed bug sniffing dogs has really risen dramatically. They're really very effective, as far as monitoring hotel rooms and other things very quickly, and much more efficient than visual inspections. Because chemicals don't work, we have had to go to physical controls. And one of the most effective ones is heat treatment. They will come in with machines that will generate 140 degrees ambient air temperature. The killing point for a bed bug is 112 degrees. Insects have no capacity to cool their bodies. So that's what happens here, is we heat them to a point, and they just die. This takes, often, three or four hours. It takes some understanding of the physics of a building. 

If you have a building on a cement slab, it's very difficult to get that slab warm enough to generate the heat, so you have to put insulation and whatnot on the floor. But this treatment really has given us at least one possibility. Because of the cost, in particular, many people are not following through on it. Commonly, you would be quoted a price of $1200 to treat an average small apartment. And larger units probably would have more than that. But they can't become resistant to the heat, so that's one of the advantages. Now, a fascinating side light to this. This beast is a type of assassin bug. And we call it the masked hunter bug. It's about an inch long. 

And assassin bugs eat other insects. So, they're predators. They get the name masked hunter bug because they're nymphs cover themselves with dust. And so, they look walking dust balls, which looks quite interesting. It makes them a little difficult to find. Now, the old name for these things is the masked bed bug hunter. That name is a little deceptive. They will feed on bed bugs. But they feed on other insects, carpet beetles and ants. What I find fascinating is, in the last 8-10 years, the number of cases of masked hunter bugs I see have gone up dramatically, too. 

So, there's a correlation between the predators and whatnot, and we don't think it's direct, here. One of the changes in controlling insects is, you know, if you go back 30-40 years ago, it was the norm for somebody to come in and spray the baseboards in public buildings, in apartments, in hotels, with insecticides to prevent problems. And because we don't want to be exposed to these kind of things, this kind of strategy really is basically non-existent anymore. And if you have a problem, you deal with it, but you don't treat preventively, especially in a climate like Wisconsin. Maybe in Florida, where there are bugs coming in all the time, it's a little bit easier to justify. But with the lack of residual insecticides, that has allowed things like this to become more prevalent. They probably were kept down in numbers because of the residual pesticides that we used to find in buildings. These little guys are cute. As I said, I just find it very interesting, that the number of cases of this has really risen, right along with the bed bug populations. Now, another creature that seems to be taking advantage of the changes in the way we do things are cloths moths. 

Again, early in my career, if I saw a case of cloths moth once every two or three years, I really thought that was interesting. But now, all of a sudden, I get a number of cases every year. There are two cloths moths. And they're really quite secretive little animals. This is the case making cloths moth. And what you see here on this slide are two caterpillars who have constructed these little cigar-like tubes. They live inside there. They're feeding on a silk pillow. Aside from the case making cloths moth, there's a second species called the webbing cloths moths. The difference is in the larval behavior more than anything else. 

The adult of these are very small brown moths. And I will tell you, they are really quite secretive. You rarely see them out in the open. And really, they're not that hard to identify if you get a nice fresh specimen. You see here, there's no markings on the wings. They have this very interesting tuft of hairs up on their head. This is the webbing cloths moth. This is the case making cloths moth. But you can see, these things are only about two to three millimeters in size. The adults do no damage at all. 

But it's the larvae, and they feed on anything of natural fibers. So we're talking hair, wool. We have trouble in animal mounts. They'll feed on the hair and cause it to slip and fall. This happened to be a Native American artifact that was made of beaver hair and feathers, among other things. And they pretty much destroyed it. That was the webbing cloths moth. This is another case where they got into an oriental rug. They can cause extensive damage to very expensive properties. And here is a whole bunch of case making cloths moths. 

The debris you see left behind is the dry insect waste, very characteristic of them feeding. In many cases, the moth will pupate inside it, fly away, and it leaves this case behind. So there's evidence, even five years after the fact, of the moths being present. Now, back in the '70s, it was quite common to treat sheep with chlorinated carbon insecticides, like deodorant. And the interesting thing about those old DDT relatives is, once you mix them the wool, they didn't go anywhere. Even when you processed it, a lot of things back in the '60s and '70s were moth proof because of what was put on the sheep when the sheep was being reared. Those chemicals have been long gone because of environmental concerns. And so, now without that, we're seeing less and less moth proofing going on, whether it's done purposely or not. And I think that's one of the main reasons we're seeing this resurgence. Some of it has to do with trade, also. 

I see quite a bit of stuff out of Eastern Europe that has cloths moth problems. I see quite a bit of stuff coming out of South America. So again, just trade with people brings it into the environment, and then it takes off from there. This has been kind of an interesting one to watch. If you find holes in your cotton shirts and other things, that's not cloths moth. There's not enough protein and synthetics. They don't feed on that kind of stuff. It has to be natural types of stuff. So mohair would be hit. Silk would be hit. 

Woolens would be hit. So, this has been kind of an interesting one to watch. And at times, rather difficult to deal with. You know, people who spin a lot of their own yarn and wool down have so many places for these things to thrive on, that once they do get established, they're kind of hard to take care of. Okay, just a couple other things to share with you. If you ever call me and tell me you have ants, you probably hear a little bit of silence from me first. Because we have probably 15 different species of ants that you could possibly find in your house. And if we go outside, we can find quite a few more. And to be honest, my control strategies are very dependent on who you got. And this one that has become, again, a very frequent problem that was really very infrequent when I first started. 

It's called a pavement ant. And it's a European species. It doesn't get the name because it's on the sidewalk. I'm really not quite sure what the derivation was. It really is a very interesting ant under the microscope. When we identify ants, we have to look at things such as these little bumps between the abdomen and thorax. Does it have two bumps? Does it have one bump? In particular, this ant has a little spine, which is quite unusual for Wisconsin ants. Then, if you look at the face, you might see these parallel little etched lines in the face. 

It almost looks like somebody has sculptured the head. So those are the three characters that help me separate this ant. It's been in the United States for well over a hundred years. And I remember early in my career, I used to read about how prevalent it was in the northeast. But I never saw it in Wisconsin. It just didn't seem to be much of an issue. In the last 15 years, it has now become the second most common ant, next to carpenter ants, that I see. In fact, I think it's even overtaken carpenter ants, as far as submission of samples. What makes it somewhat problematic is most ants that we have that are native have one queen. So if you can somehow kill the queen, you can control the colony. 

Pavement ants have multiple queens. So, technically, you have to kill every queen to control them. The other thing that's somewhat unique about their biology, aside from wanting to live in your house, which is not typical of many of our native ants, is that if you stress them, they can pick up, lock, stock and barrel, and move to another part of the house, which again, is not typical of most of our ants. So this one has really been quite frustrating, particularly if you want to spray for them. Because if you spray here, it'll chase them into the back, and you chase there. So you can find where that strategy doesn't work so well, so we have to bait them. You provide them some food that has some kind of poison. And what ants will do, this is one weakness in their biology, they feed each other. So if you can get a few ants to pick up some bait, they will feed it to the other ants and the queen. I will tell you that almost 90% of the colony are all females. 

The non-winged forms are what we called workers. Those are sterile females. The queens, of course, are the reproductive females. And the only time that ants produce males is when it's mating season. And the number of males they produce really tells you how strong the colony is. So, you might have seen this phenomena sometime, where thousands of winged ants are bubbling out of an area. That's called a swarm. And that's usually a combination of males and females. The other fascinating thing about ants, and bees do this, too, is the queen determines the sex of the offspring. If she fertilizes the egg, it is a female. 

If she fails to fertilize the egg, it's a male, which I find quite fascinating. So as I said, she can control it. When she needs males, she knows how to do it. That also means we have half the genetic component of the female. So, in insect societies, males are not near as important as some of us would like them to be. Okay, well, we're up to the spider. This one does almost go on the urban legend side of things. You can get on the Internet now and see all kinds of horrendous stories about the brown recluse spider. It's sometimes called the fiddle back spider, because one of the characteristics of this spider is this very well defined violin shape on the thorax. The other thing, and you can't quite pick it up from this picture, I'm not sure we'll get it on the next one. 

Not really. Here again you can kind of see this. They're not an overly big spider, but under the microscope, they only have six eyes. Most of our spiders that are native have eight eyes. And so that's a very quick way, if you've got any kind of magnification, to tell 'em apart. Now, when you hear about recluse, you hear about these horrendous stories that somebody got this little spider bite and it developed into this ulcer. And if you go on the internet, you can find this. I didn't want to share the whole succession of pictures, because within about a four or five day period of time, it's eroded down to the bone. So it really is quite dramatic. What I will tell you is, that is not a recluse bite. 

And one of the things that always disturbed us is, recluse is not native to Wisconsin, but yet we hear all these people that were diagnosed with recluse bites. In fact, when you did the work-up of it, a lot of this work was done by a scientist at Cal Riverside, and what he found is, half the cases that were getting diagnosed were in states the spider is not found. So something isn't adding up here, and what it's turned out to be is that a lot of these horrific types of problems are not spider bites, but are staph infections. And so -- really was responsible for a lot of the false recluse diagnosis. The normal range is central Illinois. We still think that is where the range is. I have seen, in 32 years of running the lab, four populations that I know have been established in breeding. Not spreading, but breeding. One in Racine in an old convent. One in Madison about two miles from here, west of here in an apartment. 

One in Janesville, and a recent one in Ripon that has been there for at least three years. They've been trying to control it. Recluse is not so easy to control. It's kind of a secretive spider. One of the interesting things, though, is that, to show you how much it's kind of overblown, there was a study done down in Missouri, just outside of St. Louis in a farmstead, where recluse was quite common. And the family made it a family project to collect spiders. And they collected 1,600 and some odd recluse spiders in a six month period of time, and nobody ever got bit. And so, as I said, even where you do find recluse, they really are not all that dangerous. Yet, you will hear all the time about, "My neighbor got this bite and had to go to the hospital." 

As I said, I would guess that in many of those cases, if it really was looked at closely, it probably was more likely a bacterial infection. And the person, if you ever want to get some really good information on recluse, Rick Vetter is the scientist in California and he's got a great site and has published quite extensively. I've really seen a turning in the medical community, has picked up on some of this information. And I'll finish up with termites. I find this one fascinating, because the way I tell this story, when I started in the lab, I could name the communities that had termites in Wisconsin on one hand. And now I have run out of toes, fingers, and the like, because termites are being found quite a bit more frequently, but the termite in Wisconsin behaves as a totally different animal than the termites that are found down South, even though it's the same species. The line I use right now is from a bit north of La Crosse all the way to Green Bay. And we see that most of those counties are filled in. I know of a termite colony over off of Monroe Street that's been here as long as Phil has. I know of one in old Middleton that's been down there, we know of at least since the 1950s. 

So they get introduced somehow and we speculate that most of the ways they're introduced, in fact, most of the cases that we've been able to follow up on, is they've been brought in on infested railroad ties or landscape timbers. And then once you bring them here, they can thrive. And they thrive like a gigantic colony. We don't see them swarm like they do down South where all the winged forms come and disperse and cause all kinds of problems elsewhere. But these colonies can get large enough that one colony can attack three or four city blocks. And then it's a long, slow process, but they feed on wood. And this is a close-up of very fascinating one that was found over in Iowa County along the river by Muscoda. And the story was, the gentleman had a nice little cabin by the river. In fact, really, it was a small house. Was not aware of any problems till he wanted to do some re-siding and they lifted the siding off, and all the wood underneath it had been eaten. 

And one of the characteristics, and it's a little hard to pick up this, but again, when we're done I can share with you, I brought some samples. When eastern subterranean feed, they must live in the ground, and when they come up into wood, they leave this mud casing. It almost looks like oatmeal when you get to it. And there's tubes of this and the like, and that's what we see here. Some of that grayish are these old casings that are left behind. All the way up to the roof. You can pick up in the area here along the 2x4, these are the mud tubes and they went up to the roof. And all you had to do is turn from where this picture was taken and look in back of you, and there was a stack of railroad ties about seven feet high. They used it to reinforce the bank. And I'm sure that's how it was brought in, and then after that point, they were thriving. 

The normal range for termites is figured to be the Wisconsin-Illinois border. And in the last 100 years, we've seen this range extension. But also in the last 100 years, we basically have developed centralized heating. And what we think that has done is just warmed the soil enough to allow them to extend their range to some degree. And so quite a bit of research going on at the forest products lab. Dr. Green's lab, working with baiting of termites. So much like the technology that we use for ants and really somewhat successful, but the trouble with termites is that we have multiple queens and even when you kill the queen they have a way of taking other members of the colony and making them reproductive. It's really quite fascinating biologically, what they do. And as I said, what we're learning is that the way termites behave in the northern areas almost make them a different animal than the same termite if I was talking down in Atlanta, Georgia. 

I mean, they don't behave that way down in Atlanta. So this has been really quite interesting for us. Okay. Had a couple more insects to share, but I think... One other story. My wife will like this one 'cause she likes me to pick on myself because I deserve it. 
(laughter)

 Came in the lab one day and this animal was sitting on my desk. It's called a black slug, and if you've ever seen one, they're about three inches long, and as big a round as a golf ball, and they come in various color forms. This one has almost an orangeish-like mantel. 

And just to give you an idea, this is my car key. So pretty big beast. Something that we normally wouldn't expect to see here. It turns out it really is found, originally was found in Europe, in Britain, but it has been transported to the US. There have been specimens found in Michigan before. But if you really want to go look for them, west coast. Oregon and Washington, do quite well. In this particular case, what I found out is, the person who found this crawling on their garage and getting so excited about it had just gotten some plants from Oregon. So Phil gets all excited about this and takes the pictures. And I decided to bring it home to take some more pictures. 

And on this particular day, my wife allowed me to have her car. So that was fine, and I put it in a nice little Ziplock plastic container and put it on the carpet by the passenger seat and I drove home. I got home, there's no slug. I couldn't tell my wife. And so I figured, well, I've got a chance, 'cause there's no moisture in the car. So what I did was, I got a real wet rag and I stuffed it up as high as I could up in the passenger side for the night, thinking, the next morning, the slug will be attracted to that and we'll catch the slug and life will be good. When I got out there the next morning, there was a great big slime trail along the carpeting, so the slug had been there, but there was no slug on the rag. And so I waited and I waited, and I looked and I looked, and I went about seven days and finally decided one of two things happened. It crawled somewhere else or it died. And probably died is more likely. 

It took me three months to tell my wife. 
(laughter)

 And the bottom line of that is, I am not allowed to take her car and bring any friends home anymore. 
(laughter)

 With that, I guess, more than happy, we'll take just a short break and let the camera people take care of things, and then I'll open it up to questions. And again, we'll also, I think, afterwards have the opportunity- I brought some termites. I brought some bedbugs. Brought some ants, brought a couple other things in case people want to see. So thanks for your attention.
(applause)