Bugs and Other Parasites
As important as bugs are to our ecosystems, they are also so often annoying, or gross, or fear inducing, and when you're essentially living in the woods for a month, there are a lot of bugs around.
Mosquitoes
Mosquitoes are insects in the Culicidae family and there are over 200 species of mosquito found in the U.S. and only 12 of those species can spread disease. Only female mosquitoes bite and they do this because they need a blood meal to be able to produce eggs.
I think anyone who has spent any time in Northern Michigan in the summer is familiar with the hordes of mosquitoes that are literally everywhere. Southern Michigan mosquitoes honestly have nothing on the sheer amount of them further North. I was so excited the first week to visit the old growth forest, spend some time feeling like a little fairy among the giant trees and take in all that history contained in the nature around me. And the forest was beautiful, but I think I spent half of that field trip swatting at the tiny bugs in the air surrounding me. So here’s what I would recommend.
1. Deet is your friend. Give up on any “natural” or “essential oils” bug spray, it doesn’t work. You need the real thing.
2. Long everything, pants, sleeves, socks. They can’t get you if you’re covered, no matter how hot it is, sometimes you just need to put on long sleeves to protect yourself. I recommend investing in something lightweight but full coverage for this exact reason.
3. Bug nets? I personally did not have one but have heard great things about those dorky looking hats with the bug nets attached and any other sort of bug net-garment to keep your limbs protected without wearing extra clothing.
Swimmer's Itch
Swimmer’s itch, or cercarial dermatitis, is skin irritation caused by the larvae of certain flatworms, the cause of swimmer’s itch was discovered in 1928 at the University of Michigan Biological Station on Douglas Lake by Dr. William W. Cort.
So I had heard of swimmer’s itch before coming to the bio station, but I had also swam in Douglas lake countless times before that one fateful morning. So until that afternoon, when red bumps started to appear on my legs, and I started itching all over, I really wasn’t too worried about swimmer’s itch at all. It just wasn’t on my mind, but once realization set in, like the itching, it was constantly on my mind.
The morning was cold and foggy, the last thing I wanted to do was get in the lake, but when science calls, sometimes you have to answer. So I followed my group mates into the surprisingly warm water, declining the offer of borrowing waders. I spent the next 20 minutes using my hands and feet to feel around in the sand for snails, collect them, mark and release them. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I started to notice the red bumps up and down my legs, at first I thought “wow the mosquitoes must have attacked me in my sleep,” but as the people around me started to whisper about their own bumps, and what the nurse had said, it all fell into place. Someone sent a screenshot of the wikipedia page to the group chat, and there it was, “Swimmer’s itch was discovered in Douglas Lake in Northern Michigan” the very lake we had spent the morning in.
To save you from the same itchy fate, here is what I learned in terms of swimmer’s itch:
1. Avoid swimming first thing in the morning.
2. Towel dry immediately after swimming.
3. Shower or rinse off soon after swimming.
4. If you do happen to get swimmer’s itch:
a. Benadryl will stop the itching but it will also put you to sleep, sometimes this is exactly what you need.
b. Zyrtec or some other non-drowsy allergy medication will help significantly.
c. If it isn’t covering your entire body, hydrocortisone cream is great for small areas.
Thankfully, if you do have swimmer’s itch it should only take a couple days for the itching to stop, and a couple more days after that for the bumps to disappear. It is purely a very annoying parasite to catch, and super gross once you realize that snail parasites are all up in your skin, but you will recover thankfully and now I laugh about the whole story.
Ticks
Ticks are not insects, they are arachnids and are part of the mite superorder Parasitiformes. Ticks use a feeding strategy known as “questing” where they will wait on blades of grass or other foliage and drop onto a human or animal passing by.
I won’t lie, I was terrified of ticks, the little voice in my head was constantly telling me there was a tick, somewhere on my body that I couldn’t see, burying into my skin. My actual tick encounter went something like this: Huh, there’s something crawling on my leg, I flicked it away and it was long gone before I realized that small round bug was definitely a tick. Yes most people found a tick or five crawling on them at some point, but only a few people actually had one that had bitten, and no one got a disease as far as I’m aware. By the second week that tick paranoia in the back of mind quieted down, but this is not to say don’t take precautions.
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1. Clothing, tall socks and long pants make it a lot harder for any tick that does land on you to make it to your skin.
2. Bug spray? There are tick specific sprays, and bug sprays that claim to repel ticks, I honestly have no idea if these actually work at all but they do give some peace of mind.
3. Tick checks, in my opinion the most thorough way to check yourself for ticks is to strip down, hop in the shower, and take a few minutes to run your hands over your entire body, paying close attention areas like behind your ears, armpits, any crevices a tick could crawl into. I did this pretty much once a day while at the BioStation and it not only made sure I caught any ticks but also let me sleep at night without the feeling that bugs might be all over me.
4. You’ll be fine, ticks don’t tend to bite right away so as long as you check for them consistently, you should catch any before they bite. If they do bite, get a friend or the nurse to help you remove it and remember there are antibiotics for lyme disease if it comes to that. In my opinion, ticks are more of a mental battle than a physical one.
Mayflies
Mayflies, order Ephemeroptera, have an interesting life cycle. Eggs fall to the bottom of a body of water and can take up to a few weeks to hatch into nymphs which then live for up to two years foraging on the bottom before emerging as adults. Adult mayflies live for just a day or two, swarming above water to mate, laying eggs and then dying.
Half awake, I slid on my sandals and walked to the bathroom. I reached for the door and noticed it was covered in hundreds of mayflies. The whole building was covered in them, someone had left the light on overnight, drawing them in. I watched one struggle against the stream of water as I brushed my teeth, trying to feel some sympathy for this creature that would certainly be dead in the next 24 hours anyways. I remembered what Kevin had said in class yesterday, that mayflies emerge in swarms to mate and die quickly because the adults don’t even have mouths to eat. What a strange life that must be. Later that night, walking back from the beach, I look up at the cloud of swarming insects in the fading sunlight, desperately trying to connect with one another, to reproduce, before meeting their ever nearing death.
1. Mayflies are totally harmless, it is freaky to wake up and see the buildings completely covered in these bugs, with their weird tails, but seriously they don’t even have mouths, they cannot hurt you.
2. Turn your lights off at night, or else you become a beacon inviting your cabin to be covered in insects, and close your door fully, you don’t want a hundred new cabin mates.
3. Once they emerge, get ready for their death. If you thought having live bugs all over the outside of buildings was gross, get ready for the dead bugs covering the surface of the lake. I would take a break from swimming for the next few days.
Bugs are Friends?
Harlequin Darner, Gomphaeschna furcillata, is a small dragonfly that typically mates in wooded swamps or boggy areas but can be found foraging away from breeding sites. Harlequin Darners will often land on observers.
My legs burned as I reached the summit of the dune, we were taking a day trip to Sturgeon bay on Lake Michigan. I was holding my already discarded jacket in one arm and trying to keep my slightly asthmatic breathing under control. My backpack hit the sand with a thud and I followed soon after it, not worrying about the sand that will surely make its way back with me. I watched as a small spider crawled over, what must seem to him, an enormous sand hill, sinking in with each step. Never in my probably thousands of times at the dunes have I stopped to really notice, the dunes that I think of so fondly are the entire world to these organisms, a harsh environment where they must adapt to survive. As I sketched my view from the top of the dune, a dragonfly circled me and landed, right on my 3 week-old tattoo. I froze, holding one arm still while slowly reaching over to pick up my phone and get a selfie with my new dragonfly friend.
It is so easy to instinctively retract from bugs, brush them away or squish them but most of them really mean us no harm. I’m so glad I let that dragonfly rest on my arm, I’m sure they needed the break from flying, and I needed the break from everything else. For those 10 minutes, I was in the dragonfly’s world, paying attention to all the little details and sitting so still until it took off, and I took off running down the dune.
