The
New York Times recently sat down with Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at The Museum of Natural History to discuss bedbugs.
The New York TimesThe Man Who Lets the Bedbugs BiteBy SAKI KNAFO
Published: February 20, 2009
LOUIS SORKIN has been an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History since 1978, and he is an expert in that most reviled blood-sucking creature, the bed bug. As bed-bug complaints in the city have skyrocketed in recent years — calls to 311 rose 34 percent, to 9,213, in the past fiscal year — New Yorkers have flocked to him for advice.
A mild-mannered man who studied entomology at the University of Connecticut, Mr. Sorkin, 55, works in an office cluttered with vials and jars, a picture of Spiderman, old typewriters and shelves lined with bug-related literature (“The Ants of Ohio,†“Sphecid Wasps of the Worldâ€). Tarantulas live in tanks by the office door.
As hundreds of bed bugs crawled inside a jar on the table in front of him, Mr. Sorkin spoke about the insects and about City Council hearings, scheduled for Tuesday, that will focus on bills designed to address the problem.
On a normal day we might receive a package of preserved spiders and insects from Honduras or Nicaragua or Australia. Scorpions are taken out; someone else works on them. Spiders are given to me.
I identify them to the family level or further and label them: wolf spiders, fishing spiders, widow spiders, goblin spiders. Once they’re labeled, they go into the collection. The spider collection takes up four rooms.
There are only a few drawers of bed bugs, but we have species you would normally only see on a bird or bat somewhere.
Around 1989, someone brought in our first bed bug. Most entomologists had never seen a live infestation before. Now, infestations may be approaching the levels of 50 years ago, before DDT was used.
Some of the chemicals used now appear to have similarities to DDT, but bed bugs have developed ways of bypassing the toxicity. Some bugs were recently collected here in New York, and a journal article reported that they were 300 times more resistant than other bed bugs to one of the common insecticides.
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