What if bugs didnt exist

This gives them easy access to anything you transport with you and a free ride to everywhere you go, including your home. But there's a reason why this saying is so old and so well known: bed bugs have been around for a very long time. These pesky insects have recently seen a resurgence in population and now, it's more likely than ever that you or someone you know will eventually deal with some kind of bed bug infestation.

Suddenly, that phrase takes on a whole new significance! No one wants to share their bed with bugs, and this feeling especially applies to the aptly named bed bugs. Bed bugs are small, parasitic insects that feed on our blood while we sleep.

If you've spotted large, black ants in or near your house along with small piles of what looks like sawdust, there's a chance you may have wood ants. As their name might suggest, wood ants — also called carpenter ants — can cause structural damage to wooden parts of your home.

Bed bugs are tiny pests that love to hide in furniture and other common areas. In recent years, bed bugs have gone from living in obscurity to taking center stage in the United States. But you don't just find them in your home — you can also encounter them while traveling.

Learn how to check for bed bugs while traveling and what to do if you find them. Termites are one household pest that every homeowner dreads. Mosquitoes kill more people than any other species in the world, and half of the global population is at risk of contracting a disease from a simple mosquito bite. More than a million people, mostly from poorer countries, die every year from malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Livestock and other animals are infected too. But what would happen if the most hated insect in the world was eradicated off the face of the Earth? Mosquitoes have been around for more than million years. And with more than 3, named species of mosquito , they play a big part in many ecosystems. Of the 3, species of mosquitoes, only go after humans, while most leave humans alone.

Does this mean that removing mosquitoes from the planet would leave predators without prey? Would it leave plants without pollinators?

In short, yes. However, many scientists believe the niche currently filled by mosquitoes would be taken over by other organisms, possibly causing things to go back to normal or even better.

Indeed, mosquitoes do make a big impact on Earth. They affect the behavior of all species, including humans, and they are an abundant and often easy food source for insect eaters. They also are a driving force in the evolution of defense mechanisms. Still, many scientists think their absence would not be missed and that other species would take the place of mosquitoes and be less of a nuisance to humans.

If mosquitoes were eradicated from the planet, hundreds of species of fish would have to change their diet. This could be problematic, especially for the mosquitofish, a specialized predator that is extremely adept at killing mosquitoes. Aquatic entomologist, Richard Merritt , warns that some fish could actually go extinct. These intrepid insects will colonize pretty much any place where people pile up, including hotels, movie theaters, libraries, even the occasional subway —ready and waiting to ruin a human life with their bloodsucking mouthparts and death-defying durability.

But in reality, bed bugs predate humans by leaps and bounds, making us the unwanted interlopers that first crossed into their turf. According to a newly mapped bed bug family tree, these puny pests have been guzzling the blood of other animals for more than million years, long before the rise of both modern humans and bats, their most common host.

Bed bug bites are caused primarily by two species—Cimex lectularius and Cimex hemipterus—which pierce human skin and drink blood with their sucking mouthparts. Luckily, neither is thought to transmit disease. Image Credit: smuay, iStock. The scourge of bed bugs on humankind is believed to stretch back to the very dawn of our species.

Dung beetles save the U. Bugs matter, and if scientists know how many bugs are in a square meter or what those bugs weigh, they can get an idea of how capable the existing bug population is of doing all the jobs bugs do. If you know how many pounds of bugs a single bird eats, then you know how many birds can live off the bugs in a Panamanian tree.

And the answers to those questions are pretty important, because they tell you practical facts — like whether birds can survive in a given habitat, or whether the poop is going to start piling up on your farm. That means biomass is both a measure of the health of an insect community and of nature as a whole. And this is where the wacky science of weighing bugs starts to overlap with the existentially stressful science of watching helplessly as ecosystems collapse.

Invertebrates, a group that includes insects, are poorly studied by conservation biologists, at least in comparison to their numbers, and the health of their communities can vary a lot by location and species. For instance, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature the group whose research plays a big role in determining which species we consider endangered tracks only 3, species of terrestrial invertebrates — bugs, basically, plus worms and some mollusks.

But of those, 42 percent are threatened with extinction. And you can see this in specific groups of species, as well. A study took advantage of a long history of records documenting populations of moths and butterflies in a protected grassland in Germany. It found declines in the number of species recorded, from a high of in the s to 71 by the early s. In the s, 50 percent of the moth and butterfly species were generalists: animals that can happily live in many places.

By the s, 68 percent were generalists.