Bed Bugs and Cockroaches Survived the Ice Age

It’s definitely not a Love Scene

The University of Sheffield’s department of animal and plant sciences research team initiated an investigation into the bizarre mating methods of bed bugs, known as “traumatic insemination”. Male bed bugs have a dagger-like penis, with which they stab the female to inseminate directly into her bloodstream.

Prof Siva-Jothy said “These animals are so strange – they don’t do anything like any other animal does. The “Achilles heel” could be hidden in their genetic code.

The team took 15 years to gather DNA samples from 30 species and was able to build their genetic bed bug timeline by studying the mutations in the genetic code acting like a molecular clock, allowing the scientists to trace the bugs’ evolution back for at least 115 million years.

Dr Steffen Roth, from the University Museum Bergen, in Norway, said: “The first big surprise we found was that bed bugs are much older than bats, which everyone assumed to be their first host, by more than 50 million years. Although, we don’t yet know what their host was at the time when T. Rex walked the Earth.”

Prof Siva-Jothy added that “These findings will help us better understand how bed bugs evolved the traits that make them effective pests. That will also help us find new ways of controlling them.”

For now, we know that heating bed bugs to 45C will effectively kill both the adults and eggs.