Our Laundry is infested with.......just what are those things!?

I always love when people come running up to me holding a box, bucket, or coffee can claiming there is something inside and they want to know what it is right away. I have learned the hard way NEVER to open these packages indoors. Supposedly dead birds have flown into my face and then taken up roost in my office for hours while I tried to evict them. 

I arrived back from lunch one afternoon and a coworker stuck his head into the office asking me to come out to the visitor center desk and help identify something.  I popped around the corner to see a slightly frantic woman standing at the desk.  This is what happened next:
        Frantic Woman: "Do you know anything about bugs?" she thrust out a peanut butter jar towards me.
         Me: "Yep, your in luck I know a thing or two."  I took the jar making sure the lid was screwed on tight.
         Frantic Woman: (This was said all in one rapid fire breath.) "Are those bed bugs? We got our laundry back from the company that cleans it and the sheets are infested with those. Do we have to send them back to get cleaned again? Are they dangerous? Should we call the company? Do we need to look for a new company to clean our sheets?"
         Me: After a few minutes of staring into what I thought was an empty jar I noticed some brown "dust particles" at the bottom. I started to unscrewed the lid to get a better look. "Good new! They are not bed bugs, they are not dangerous to humans, probably no reason to call the company, and they are going to be easy for you to get rid of."
        Frantic woman: "Your 100% sure?"
        Me: "Absolutely! What happened is last night after your sheets came out of the dryer and were folded these little guys took advantage of the lingering heat inside your laundry bags and crawled in to stay warm since it was a rather chilly fall night last night. Easiest way to get rid of them grab the sheet shake real hard and then remake the bed and vacuum the rug and you should be good."
        Frantic woman: "Really!?"
        Me: "Yep, flicking the sheet will kill most of them and those that live with die by vacuum."

What this woman had handed me in the jar was about seven or eight little pseudoscorpions which to the average person look like little baby scorpions.

Photo By Ryan Hodnett

These are in the same taxonomic group as spiders, Class Arachnida. Now unlike a real scorpions these have no stinger or tails and can not deliver a sting. They are also super super super small body size ranging from just 1/16-1/8 of an inch long. You can tell just how small they are by comparing them to the size of the thumb and forefinger on the left side of the photo below. 

Photo By Casey Richart & Bill Leonard

These little creepy crawlies live in the soil, leaf littler, the books in your bookcase and spend their time hunting for springtails, fleas, bark lice, ants, mites. They grab their unsuspecting prey with those large claws, inject it with poison from a gland inside those claws and then once their prey stops moving they inject saliva into the prey. This saliva slowly dissolves the prey's insides before the pseudoscorpion slurps up the juice much in the same way a spider does.While they do have a thin exoskeleton you walking though your backyard squishes them flat as a pancake. I am sure if you took a magnifying glass to the contents of your vacuum cleaner bag you could find bits and pieces of pesudocorpions along with the dist mites they were trying to capture.




Want to know more:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/how-book-scorpions-tend-to-your-dusty-tomes/
https://extension.umn.edu/insect-relatives/pseudoscorpions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5KSNA5K57s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYBDtlZvaX0
https://www.wired.com/2015/12/absurd-creature-of-the-week-the-sexy-saga-of-the-harlequin-beetle-and-the-pseudoscorpion/
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150511-tiny-arachnids-grisly-sacrifice












   

Opps! Sorry, Did I Do That!?

Think about what you do for work and then make a mental list of all the dangers and possible ways you could die doing your job. Is it a long list or fairly short? A bunch of jobs I have worked in my career have come with JHSAs (Job Hazard Safety Analysis) sheets which I was required to read and sign before the first day of work. Regardless of how great you are at predicting the worst case scenario there are those things you never see coming or can predict would happen in a million years. The summer of 2003 I took a job working as a laboratory/field technician for the Center for Biodiversity Research. I would be working as part of a larger team doing a biological inventory of the Fort Indian Town Gap National Guard Training Base and I would be specifically focusing on bugs.  Now for those of you who do not know anything about the training base the biggest thing that you need to know is THEY USE LIVE BOMBS and AMMUNITION! It is one of only three places in the United States where you can fire/drop/launch live ordinances (bombs). Before starting our research we were required to attend a range safety lecture where they would go through all the hazards we could potentially face such as: getting run over by a tank (the range officer kept telling us not to take naps on the tank roads), stepping on a UXO (unexploded ordinance) causing it to explode, getting shot, having something heavy dropped on you as they trained on how to use a helicopters to move a tank, picking up a magnesium flare that had not fully exploded, the list goes on but I will not bore you with the whole list. Thankfully, we made it through the research season with no injuries except for my boss developing a minor case of heat stroke.

Things were going well with the research we were finding interesting insects in our collected specimens.

Family: Enicocephalidae

Things were going great until one day I walked into the lab and turned off the fume hood. The rule of thumb in the lab is if you put something into the fume hood you are supposed to tape a note to the door with with your name and why it is on and if/when it can be turned off. After listening to its jet engine like noise for five hours straight I got up and turned it off not seeing any reason that it needed to be left on after all there were only four mason jars in it. Fast forward two hours later my coworker walks into the lab and starts talking to me and in just a few minutes realized we (mainly me) need to go outside QUICKLY.  We sat outside talking for a while, I really have no idea how long, and then at some point I looked at him and said "why are we sitting outside?" "Welcome back" was his first response followed by a looooong silent pause. He sifted nervously on the grass trying not to make eye contact. I stood and brushed the grass off my pants and started to head back into the lab before he stopped me and said it would probably be a good idea to wait a little longer.  By this time I was beginning to get annoyed because it was clear something was going on and my coworker was not going to talk easily.  Over dinner, he insisted on paying, he spilled the beans by first asking me if I noticed a funny smell in the lab which I had not noticed anything different. "I made killing jars and put them in the hood to dry and forgot about them." he explained.  "I'm gonna, need more information here." I replied staring at him. So, long awkward story short killing jars are made with a killing agent, layer of sawdust over that, and then a cap of plaster of paris. In the case of the jars my coworker made cyanide crystals are the killing agent.   

Now there are two types of people in this world; those who posses the gene which allows you to smell cyanide (my coworker) and those of us who lack this particular gene (me).  If I had possessed said gene I would have noticed shortly after turning off the fume hood the somewhat odd smell of either bitter almonds or industrial bleach depending on your perspective. According to my coworker when he arrived in the lab I was having some difficulty stringing words together, admitted to having a headache, and being slightly dizzy. Those are just some of the signs of cyanide poisoning. Good news in this story is because it was not a small confined space and there was a cross draft through the lab there was not going to be any permanent damage to me. Large dose of fresh air and I was my normal self again. I am fairly confident that to this day my coworker clearly labels fume hoods from now on.   



 More Info. 

 https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/cyanide/basics/facts.asp

  

Dragging out my soapbox!

Recently I was looking online to get more information on why hedgehogs are illegal as a pet here in Maine and found out that in 2017 the state of Maine removed restrictions from owning a hedgehog as a pet. Prior to 2017 you could own a hedgehog but there were two permits you needed to have.

Now while I was reading through various news articles about the recent change I stumbled across one in a local paper which really (pardon my language here) pissed me off. The author of said article basically made it seam like you would have to be insane to want to own one of these animals which could potentially kill you and all your neighbors just by owning one because of all the potential viruses they carry!

Taking a deep breath here, first let me say that I worked with and cared for a hedgehog at a science center I worked in for three years. This hedgehog was given to us after the owner realized that the much more specialized care then they had time for. Second thing you need to know is said hedgehog's home was the preschool room where his cage was right next to the pet rabbit and at no time did any of the children in the preschool or any of the other school children, who met the hedgehog, get sick or die from touching it. 

Hedgehogs have the potential to carry a variety of diseases such as ringworm and salmonella to name just two. The most common hedgehog related illness is Salmonella Typhimurium. This form of Salmonella can be found in the poop of reptiles, rats, mice, hamsters, ducks, chickens, horses, goats, sheep, parrots, cats and dogs just to name a few.  

Looking at the CDC website there have been  at least two major outbreaks of Salmonella Typhimurium caused by pet hedgehogs, 2012 and 2019, sickening a total of 80 people and tragically leading to one death. No other diseases hedgehogs have been know to carry have caused outbreaks in the United States.  Another popular animal which also carries the same strain of Salmonella which has been on the raise as the trend of "backyard farming" has taken off is chickens. Scanning the CDC website there have been three major outbreaks (2013, 2017, 2019) of sickness from a variety of Salmonella strains which resulted from contact with backyard chickens. In total three people died and 2,610 were sickened. IT IS ALL ABOUT PROPER HANDLING!!!!!!!

When I was teaching I ALWAYS had two rules the children had to follow if they wanted to touch the hedgehog; 1) No hitting or hurting the hedgehog, 2) After touching the hedgehog you walk straight to the teacher without touching your face or anyone else to wash your hands. Sounds simple want to avoid getting sick do not; lick, snuggle next to your face, let it walk around where you are doing food preparations, do not let it sleep with you, simple things will keep you safe and germ free. 

As to the second point in the newspaper article as to why hedgehogs are a dangerous pet they pose a threat to other wildlife if released. That is a possibility in certain areas of the country where the temperature never gets much below 70 F. Hedgehogs in the United States are domesticated from African species and cannot really tolerate temperatures below 68 F anyway. Here in Maine at least survival in the wild would be rather slim. If they were such a huge threat to local wildlife the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife would not have decided to add them to their unrestricted list. 

Sliding my soapbox back into the closet........until next time. 

Read more:

https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/typhimurium-01-19/index.html

https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/blog/hedgehogs-and-salmonella/