Give Blood

Volume four number Two, Two Thousand eighT

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summer

Bud Guthrie: Montana’s True Talker an Essay by William Kittredge

The Future of Wilderness: Can We Protect the Last of Our Best Places? Avalanche Survivor Cycling Toward Beijing Olympics The Unleashing of Rivers at the Milltown Dam Anaconda’s Club Moderne: a Montana Institution

give blood Every summer they bite you, suck your blood and make you itch and suffer. So why on Earth do we need bugs?

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BY SCOT T McMILLION PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LEE

ere’s something to think about the next time your neck and arms have become an itching, oozing mess. Or when the whining in your ears makes you think seriously about spending the night in a lake, underwater. Or when you’re inhaling flies the size of

The horse fly is the largest of the bloodeating insects common in Montana.

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your thumbnail. When these things happen, think about your place in the food chain and maybe it will ease your suffering. Maybe. It’s bug season in Montana. And if the mosquitoes aren’t out, chances are the deer flies will be. Or the snipe flies. Or the no see-ums. Or the midges. Or the horse flies. Those are the big mamas, the ones with scalpels for jaws that can slice a steak off your hide, toss it aside and inject the wound with bug slobber, to make sure it itches later. Bug season is a story about sex and blood. It’s about Darwinian evolution and the bounds of human tolerance: a complicated mesh that involves fish and bats and birds. You’re part of it. You feed them all. And you can’t blame the bugs for what they do. You drew them upon yourself, with your sweat and the fatty acids on your skin, with the clothing you choose, with the very air that you breathe. Still, they’re hard things to love. Even simple appreciation can be tough to muster. But some people try. “Think of it from the insect’s point of view,” said John Burger, a professor of entomology at the University of New Hampshire, where he specializes in vampires, the bugs that want our blood. He’s been making annual bug-studying trips to Yellowstone National Park since

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the 1950s, so he understands the local pests as well as New England’s. They drive him crazy, too, he admitted, but he still offers up a fondness for creatures he feeds with his own blood. His personal irritation, he said, pales in comparison to the importance of blood-sucking vermin in the greater scheme of things. “You have to look at the entire system that they live in,” Burger said. For example, as larvae, mosquitoes consume plant debris and turn it into flesh, filtering water in the process. “It’s not unlike a cow,” he said. “Turning plant matter into meat.” Horse flies show their carnivorous colors early in life. While still maggots, they’ll consume anything they can overpower, including each other, just to make themselves stronger. That maggot meat feeds fish and all sorts of aquatic insects that also nourish fish and other critters. When the adults emerge, they become food for dragonflies and birds, bats and frogs and more fish. For these creatures and more, mosquitoes and flies are an extremely important food source, Burger assures. “On the side, they bother us, but that’s nothing compared to their ecological role,” he said.

They find you by locating your odor plume, a cone of aroma made of carbon dioxide, sweat, lactic acid and other chemicals from your skin and mouth. You waft this attraction behind you like a long cape and when the huntress finds it, she swoops, jaws clicking in bloodlust and dripping with saliva engineered by nature to make you bleed faster. Without the blood meal, the eggs won’t mature. That means there won’t be maggots to feed other bugs and next year’s crop of pests won’t emerge, which might mean a more pleasant evening on the verandah, but it also means thinner pickings for birds and frogs and dragonflies, creatures that, in an indirect way, rely on your blood. Males of most fly species don’t need the blood feast. They lap up the extrusions of aphids, which, according to Burger, produce a sugary poo that the male flies particularly enjoy. They also seek nectar, helping plants to pollinate, and their bodies also feed fish and birds and such, without drawing blood from you. Male mosquitoes and most male flies are, in the blood cycle, an indolent necessity. But if their mothers hadn’t gorged on blood — maybe some of yours — the boys would never have hatched. “You’re actually contributing to their success as a member of the community that they live in,” Burger said. Unless you slap them dead. Especially those big, slow horse flies with that mouth full of razors. Killing them takes them out of the food chain, but it provides some solace and it shows that entomologists are not immune to the visceral pleasure of vengeance. “They make a satisfying squash when you swat them,” Burger agreed.

At least we’re not cows

Stable flies, non-native to Montana, are often found around barns or pastures. They have sharp teeth. Here they feed on gauze soaked in sheep’s blood at Montana State University’s Veterinary Entomology Lab in Bozeman, where all of the photos for this story were made.

And while they’re bothering us, they’re bringing us into the food chain, one drop of blood at a time. Female mosquitoes, deer flies and horse flies, after a successful bout of sex, must find a meal of blood if they are to produce healthy eggs. So, instead of ice cream and pickles, the recently impregnated swarm out in search of blood. They’ll generally take what they can find, but the best targets are large mammals, like deer or cattle or your unguarded ankles. 44

We are bug food, all of us. And as uncomfortable as that fact may be, know that it could be worse. At least we aren’t cattle. When the mosquito clouds become opaque, when the deer flies invade our ears and noses, when blood from the horse fly bites drips from our limbs, loosened by the anticoagulants in fly spit, we have options. We can smear on bug dope. We can go roast in the car. We can pack up the tent and go home. Greg Johnson, a professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, traps mosquitoes around the state to help track West Nile disease. He said the Milk River country around Malta offers the most consistent suffering, though he’s dubious of local yarns about skeeters big enough to have sex with a chicken, while standing flat-footed. While the prairie hayfields can teem with mosquitoes, the thickest swarm he’s ever seen was at Canyon Ferry Reservoir near Townsend, where he trapped an astonishing 30,000 specimens one night. (A typical Milk River mosquito roundup might produce 5,000 creatures.) “I don’t know how deer and cattle and horses survive that,”

The mosquito is the most common of Montana’s vampire insects.

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he said. Creatures of the field and forest can suffer horribly. Fly bites can drain a liter of blood from a horse in one day, and flying vampires can retard the weight gain of cattle by as much as a kilogram a day, Johnson said. And as tough as it can be in Montana, it can get even worse in other places: Scientific journals tell of cattle in the If the Rocky Mountain wood tick plays an important ecological role, entomologists say deep South literally being bled they don’t know what it is. to death by the little vampires, suffering the tortures of a million tiny incisions. “They removed enough blood that the cattle went into shock and died,” Johnson said. Ticks, too, can be deadly, even aside from the diseases they spread. A species called the “winter” tick can infest deer or elk by the thousands, removing hair, draining blood and slashing the odds of surviving a Montana winter. Ticks also are the unloveliest of bloodsuckers, with their loathsome mouths and sneaky behaviors, their fondness for crotches and armpits, the greediness of their sucking appetites, the diseases they carry. Even entomologists find them distasteful. “I just can’t find anything good to say about a tick,” Burger said. “I suppose they probably provide food for something, but I can’t think what.” “It’s hard to rationalize their place in this animal world we live in,” added Johnson.

To understand is to transcend... or maybe not Biting fly infestations vary from year to year, and scientists aren’t sure exactly why, but they postulate that varying amounts of cold and moisture in the winter and spring affect the survival of eggs and larvae, dictating whether you spend the summer slapping at yourself or lazing comfortably in the hammock. But the vampire insects never go away entirely. Snipe flies, deer flies and horse flies like hot, dry weather and feed in the daytime, according to Burger. But when they go to bed, the gnats and mosquitoes and midges wake up, especially if it’s cool or humid. Though their numbers vary, they’re all a part of the system. So are we. They bite. We swat and spray and swelter in thick clothing on hot days, trying to keep our blood to ourselves, but it doesn’t always work. Our blood nourishes vampire eggs, linking us to fish and frogs and birds. It connects us to nature, one tiny drop at a time. Thinking about this — winged vermin nourishing themselves on you so they can be gobbled alive by a toad — won’t stop the itch. But it might help you scratch it. Summer’s here. Bugs are coming. Swat away. But think about it. 46