BLACKSBURG, Va. – New research from Virginia Tech shows that bed bugs are likely the first human pest. This discovery may help inform models that help predict the spread of other pests and diseases related to urban population expansion.
“We wanted to look at changes in effective population size, which is the number of breeding individuals that are contributing to the next generation, because that can tell you what’s been happening in their past.”
Lindsay Miles, lead author and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Entomology.
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Researchers have linked bed bugs to humans around 60,000 years ago, likely originating from bats and then moving to humans. During the ice age, which was around 20,000 years ago, bed bug populations decreased. The populations associated with bats, however, never rebounded, while human bed bugs did.
“Initially with both populations, we saw a general decline that is consistent with the Last Glacial Maximum; the bat-associated lineage never bounced back, and it is still decreasing in size. The really exciting part is that the human-associated lineage did recover and their effective population increased.”
Lindsay Miles, lead author and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Entomology.
Lindsay Miles, the lead author and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech, believes that this may be a result of human expansion, and the establishment of large settlements such as Mesopotamia.
“That makes sense because modern humans moved out of caves about 60,000 years ago. There were bed bugs living in the caves with these humans, and when they moved out they took a subset of the population with them so there’s less genetic diversity in that human-associated lineage.”
Warren Booth, the Joseph R. and Mary W. Wilson Urban Entomology Associate Professor.
Researchers also looked at the genome data of these bed bugs, and are looking for evolutionary differences that may be found between human-associated and bat-associated bed bugs.
“What will be interesting is to look at what’s happening in the last 100 to 120 years. Bed bugs were pretty common in the old world, but once DDT [dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane] was introduced for pest control, populations crashed. They were thought to have been essentially eradicated, but within five years they started reappearing and were resisting the pesticide.”
Warren Booth, the Joseph R. and Mary W. Wilson Urban Entomology Associate Professor.
These researchers have also discovered a possible genetic mutation that may have led to increased pesticide resistance in bed bugs, which you can read about here.
You can read more about the research here.