Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [116]
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*112 According to integrated pest-control specialist, Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, as of 2007, one major bedding company covers the mattresses it removes from homes in plastic before placing them in their trucks.
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*113Basically, this refers to all of your property except pets, plants, and food.
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*114As it turned out, all three of these compounds were extremely toxic to humans and most other forms of life. As vividly portrayed in Rachael Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring, pesticides like DDT caused long-term environmental and health effects. Eventually, the alarm raised by Silent Spring over DDT would launch the modern environmental movement, and by the mid-1970s malathion, lindane, and other compounds known as organophosphates and carbamates were banned from use as pesticides in the United States and other countries.
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*115On a related note, “sticky traps” used to trap insects like cockroaches don’t work against bed bugs, which are more likely to travel and hide under the trap than run across its gooey surface.
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*116Essentially, you start with one cell, its genetic material divides, its cytoplasm divides, and you end up with two identical daughter cells.
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*117According to the Scrub Typhus Information Paper, published in 2005 by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, there were 5,441 cases of scrub typhus, resulting in 283 deaths among U.S. Army personnel in the Asia-Pacific theater during World War II.
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*118Using this same rationale, it’s easy to see why bootleg antibiotics or antibiotics of unknown quality are a very bad thing.
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†119 In addition to differences in diet, chiggers are smaller than adult mites and have six legs rather than eight.
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*120Ontogeny is the development of the individual from fertilized egg to adult.
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*121DNA replication (i.e., DNA synthesis) is the process by which the double-stranded DNA molecule is copied before cell division (resulting in two identical double-stranded DNA molecules and thus ensuring that each of the two resulting cells contains a full copy of the original genetic blueprint).
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†122 Alternately, as we’ll see, mutations that affect the sequence of developmental events can also provide variation that serves as the raw material for evolutionary change.
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*123Long before anyone else figured it out, Lamarck actually nailed down the fact that an environmental change like the one just described was necessary in order for evolution to occur.
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†124 Much later, a group of couch-bound scientists came up with an equally tricky question: “Why aren’t the children of professional bowlers born with super bowling skills?” Presumably this question arose in the mid-1960s, when pro bowling became a wildly popular televised sport—a phenomenon in itself that has troubled many evolutionary biologists.
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*125 And just as important, only if those changes occurred in that individual’s gametes (their sperm or egg cells). Somatic mutations (like cancer), which occur in nonsex cells (like those of the skin), are not passed on to the next generation, although inherited mutations in a person’s DNA could predispose him or her to develop skin cancer.
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*126According to entomologists R. Chapman and H. Shepard, “Mites infest foodstuffs to such an extent that the entire mass may appear to be in motion…If some of the flour which is suspected of containing mites is piled in the light, the mites will crawl away from the light and the pile of flour will usually flatten out.” And in a quote that immediately reminded me of Lou Sorkin and his citronella-scented bed bug colony, the authors stated that “when present in large numbers