Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [113]
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*85Rudy actually finished the story by reiterating that leech therapy shouldn’t be undertaken at home or without the supervision of a physician.
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*86According to New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, there were no complaints of bed bugs in fiscal year 2003, 79 complaints in 2004, 928 in 2005, 4,638 in 2006, and 6,889 in 2007.
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*87In the Helmsley case, a Mexican businessman alleged that he’d been mauled by bed bugs during his stay at the hotel. The case was quickly settled out of court. The Mandarin Oriental case, however, did not go away quietly, possibly because the plaintiffs were a prominent New York City celebrity attorney and his wife. As of March 2007, their lawyers had filed a twenty-page five-count complaint alleging that the couple had suffered over a hundred bed bug bites in an assault that continued after they returned home and the bed bugs moved into their Manhattan apartment. The couple was seeking over four million dollars in damages—which works out to around forty thousand dollars a bite.
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*88This muscle is actually what you’re eating when you chow down on the succulent meat inside a lobster, crab, or shrimp.
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*89Ecdysiast was also the term coined by the early-twentieth-century reporter and critic H. L. Mencken (famous for his coverage of the Scopes “Monkey trial” of 1925). Mencken had been contacted by Georgia Southern (“a practitioner of the art of strip-teasing”) who was concerned about negative connotations people had about “stripping.” Ms. Southern asked Mencken to “coin a new and more palatable word to describe this art” and he did. “I sympathize with you in your affliction,” Mencken wrote back to her. “It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way to the…zoological phenomenon of molting…which is ecdysis. This word produces…ecdysiast.”
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*90Molted arthropod casts and the feces dropped by their former owners are the real allergens that plague those who are hypersensitive to “dust.” Although I’m sure there are a few allergists who have chosen to spare their patients some of the following details, the discarded arthropod outerwear and microscopic excreta come from dust mites, tiny creatures more closely related to spiders than to insects. Fortunately for us, dust mites are not blood feeders (although, as we’ll see later, there are hundreds of mite species that are). Instead, they feed on the approximately twelve grams of skin flakes that humans shed each day. This epidermal debris would accumulate into gigantic snowdrifts were it not for the hungry mites.
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*91When I was a child, soft-shelled crabs were expensive and available for only a few weeks each summer. What I didn’t know was that they were actually just ordinary blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) that either didn’t get the good hiding places after a molt or had been tempted to leave them by the irresistible allure of rotting chicken entrails. Nowadays though, farm raised soft-shelled crabs can be purchased year-round since their molts are regulated by human-administered hormones.
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†92 The largest terrestrial arthropod, by far, is the coconut crab (Birgus latro), which can weigh up to 8.8 pounds (four kilograms). Birgus is a hermit crab relative but without the snail shell. It copes with the “soft-shell vs. gravity” problem by molting in the safety of its burrow, where it remains for up to thirty days. Depending on which entomologist you ask, the largest insects are either New Zealand grasshoppers, called wetas, which can weigh as much as 2.5 ounces (seventy grams), or giant beetles belonging to several genera like Goliathus, Titanus, and Megasoma. The world’s largest spider (class Arachnida) is the giant bird-eating tarantula