The Bugs That Changed Human History

PM talks with author Amy Stewart about her recent book Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects, a compendium of the most bizarre, dangerous and intriguing bugs from around the world. Insects, it turns out, have changed human history in surprising ways.

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There's a section in your book called "Bugs of War." How have bugs been a part of human conflict?

We have always used bugs for warfare, not just in ancient times but also right on up to present times. An ancient example would be something like stuffing a beehive with angry wasps and lobbing it over the enemy's wall, which is this very Monty Python-esque idea. There are stories like that going back to Greek and Roman timeseven filling a woven basket with scorpions and throwing it at someone.

And right on up through the present day: In World War II, the Japanese were actively working on a program to drop plague-infested fleas by air. They were building these clay bombs they'd put fleas in that had been [infected] with the plague. They actually did that in China and there were small outbreaks of plague. They were planning to do that in California; they called it "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night." This was in the works and was going to happen had the war not ended the way it did.

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What about bugs that aren't intentionally used as weapons, but change the course of wars anyway?

Not only do we use bugs to fight wars, of course, we also use people to fight wars and those people encounter all kinds of terrible bugs when they are on the battlefield.

The subtitle of the book is "the louse that conquered Napoleon's army," and that refers to body lice. Napoleon's soldiers were marching into Russia with whatever they could carry. They were wearing the same uniform all the time and there was no way for them to change clothes that much. They became infested with body lice, which lay their eggs in the seams of clothing. Body lice do transmit disease, so the troops got very sick.

In the [American] Civil War you have soldiers that were infested with bugs, and also eating bugs. There was this thing called hardtack, which especially the Northern troops carried with them. [Hardtack was] infested with weevils, and the soldiers used to joke that they didn't have to carry their rations because their rations could walk on their own. It was pretty impossible not to eat bugs in the Civil War because they were in all the food.

What about today?

Bugs have always been an issue in war and even today, sending our troops to the Middle East, they are encountering scorpions, they are encountering some unfamiliar spiders, [and other bugs as well]. The paederus beetle can raise big welts on the skin.

People have this habit of wanting to smack a bug when it lands on you, and it's the worst thing you can do. There's this message that public health workers try to get out, 'Brush, Don't Crush.' In other words, you should brush it off or even blow it off your skin, but don't smack it. If they're carrying disease or if they have some kind of venomous or stinging quality you're just pushing something into your skin that doesn't need to be there.

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So our soldiers, if they're tempted to just reach out and smack whatever lands on them, can end up with very nasty rashes and boils as a result.

So "brush, don't crush" applies to all kinds of bugs, not just the paederus beetle?

In general anything that lands on the skin that you don't want there, do not smack it. Brush it off of you. I know that's hard to do because we get kind of mad [and] want to kill it, but you keep yourself much safer if you just brush it off.

What about famous people from history and their troubles with bugs? I never knew that George Washington had malaria.

There are a lot of famous malaria victims, but George Washington had malaria at this sort of weird point in the history of [the disease]. We were only just figuring out how to treat it using the bark of a quinine tree. He didn't get any treatment until quite late in life because his life span happened to fall at a point where most people in the colonies didn't have access to quinine. When he started taking it, he took so much that it made him go deaf. He could barely hear during his later years as president. If you think of everything he did, and then you think of him fighting malaria the whole timethe fever, and the chills, and the aches and painsit [was] a lot to deal with.

Charles Darwin had some amusing insect encounters too, right?

That's a very famous story about Darwin. He was a bug collector and he was crazy about beetles, as a lot of young men of his ilk were at that time. He had one in each hand, and then he found a third one that he really wanted. He had nowhere to put it so he stuck it in his mouth for safekeeping (laughs) and then discovered that it sprays this nasty fluid whenever its confined, so he had to spit it out.

What are some of your favorite human-bug interactions?

I was really fond of the assassin bug. First of all, it's just a great name and it's a really interesting-looking bug. It's a bloodsucking insect, another one that Charles Darwin had a run-in with. He saw it when he was in Argentina on his voyage on the Beagle and convinced members of his crew to sit around and hold their hands out and let the assassin bug come and take a bite of them while he took notes.

He got bitten by them as well, and it may be that it gave him this nasty disease called Chagas disease, which is transmitted by assassin bugs. No one knew about it back then, but it could explain the illnesses that he had his whole life.

What bugsor bug-carried illnesseshave affected human history or human society the most?

Definitely things like malaria, which has killed hundreds of millions of people. The oriental rat fruit flea is responsible for spreading the plague, and so, of course, that really changed the course of history.

There have been some very destructive pests that have had very interesting moments in history. [For example], the boll weevil is a pest of cotton crops. It made it very difficult for cotton farmers to make a living and made it especially hard for people in the South, but ironically it may have actually helped. It did force people to diversify and to grow other things and to maybe even find more profitable crops to grow.

And then you have things like Phylloxera, which is a little creature like an aphid that went from the United States to France. It was not a big deal for American grapevines because they were resistant to them, but it devastated the French wine industry in the late 1800s.

These little tiny insects have massive effects on our lives.

Having studied humans and insects' shared history, did you find that humans are too afraid of bugs or not scared enough?

It's amazing how irrationally we can behave in the presence of a little bug. I cited this study in England that talked about the prevalence of people having car accidents because they were trying to swat at some bug that had flown into the car. That's just crazy! You're at far greater risk of a car accident because you're swerving all over the road. Whatever might have flown into your car, whether it's a bee or whatever it is, it doesn't want to sting you. Just roll the windows down or pull over or something. They really do seem to make us go kind of nuts, to our own peril, definitely.

[But when] I hear from people traveling to Latin America or some exotic location on vacation, I will always say, 'Check out what kind of shots you need, get some insect repellent here to take with you, and here's some things you can do.' I can pretty much ruin anyone's vacation by telling people what bugs can kill them when they get there. I have had people say to me that it can't be that big of a problem because the people that live there are fine, and [I'm] like, 'Yeah, they're not fine. They are really not fine.' People around the world live with incredible diseases and ailments that we don't have to live with anymore. I think we, as

Americans, tend to be overly confident.

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