Civilized life is marked by the fact that humanity has moved beyond the barbaric Neolithic times to make ends meet and into more complex times of art, literature, music, and science. Most national and cultural laws place great emphasis on guaranteeing people's enjoyment of private life and ownership of private property, but home invaders are reluctant to be bound by these legal provisions. Termites and wood beetles do not stop the process of moth-eating floors. Paper, as a tree fiber product, is only a small chemical change relative to wood, and it is equally delicious for these moths.
Wood beetle
(In order not to affect the reading experience, this time the pictures are small...) ）
When termites invaded Paris about 50 years ago, they eroded many ancient books and paper archives, causing great damage. Unlike buildings that can be repaired and rebuilt, once the orphan scrolls and handwritten parchment are destroyed, they are gone forever and there is no way to restore them. Street tabloids still have occasional rumors of termite infestation, often key legal documents such as wills, lease contracts, or large amounts of money hidden under the bed. These events are particularly prone to occur in the marginal areas where termites are relatively northbound, where people do not have a tradition of properly keeping various items, and used to use wooden boxes to store items, but now metal boxes may become necessary.
termite
You can always recognize old books that have traveled to the tropics. No matter how neatly stacked on the shelves, such books often become poor targets for many moths or paper-eating pests. Termites will completely empty a book, leaving a powder-filled cavity between the leather-bound bookcases. Clothing fish, which often haunt the kitchen, have long known to bite off the book label to eat the glue underneath, or directly eat the starch slurry, that is, the thin colloidal solution applied to make the paper flat when making paper. Bookworms are often very similar to wood beetles, just as the larvae of wood borers usually dig tunnels, and bookworm larvae sometimes moth books throughout the shelves, running through and eating, leaving a series of circular or oval neat holes in the pages. It doesn't take generations of bookworms to make a book completely unreadable, full of holes that can't be repaired at all.
Historically, natural materials, wherever they were used for manufacturing and processing, were followed by natural predators. Wood carvings and wooden musical instruments may be rendered unrecognizable or completely damaged by the borers of wood borers; the strings of the sheep intestines used in musical instruments (often mislabeled as cat intestines) can be bitten off by ham skin beetles; the paints of wall paintings and watercolors have already shown obvious signs of being eaten by ants; ancestral heirlooms such as wood carvings, clothing, bone, fur and feathers may suffer; and the few objects that enter the collection of modern museums can be relatively rarely spared. But even if they are stored in a museum, their future safety cannot be guaranteed, unless the museum's management will show the same vigilance as the proud owners who previously cherished them.
In the early 20th century, as smoking became more fashionable, a new threat to Western civilization arrived. The newly popular tobacco products, all rolled up in white paper, look elegant, but these cigarettes often have small holes, which are feathered holes caused by a small beetle called "tobacco beetle" (Lasioderma serricorne). Because of its destruction of tobacco, it soon acquired the not very appropriate colloquial term "Tobacco A". Although it was known long ago as an important pest for invading the storage of dry tobacco, and the holes formed by moths can also affect the effects of smoking, the damage to the all-brown cigars that are still fashionable to this day is obviously less obvious.
Tobacco beetles are more closely related to the beetle (species of the genus Singh) and biscuit beetles, both of which originally came from subtropical America along with tobacco. By the time entomologists began to formally establish inventories of entomological names in the 18th century, tobacco beetles had already settled in Europe and Asia. It wasn't until the 1960s that the view changed when dead tobacco nails were found in old cloth strips used to wrap ancient Egyptian mummies. This has sparked various debates, such as about the possibility that tobacco A may have originated in the Old World, and about the possibility of the ancient tobacco trade. It was only after retrospective exploration (Buckland and Panagiotakopulu, 2001) that it was discovered that the mummy had previously been opened in a museum and partially repackaged after treatment. Treatment here refers to the use of nicotine as an insecticide to control ham beetles and other cadaver pests that may eat this treasure of the town. For a while, it was a return to the original view that the tobacco beetle was a species that originated in the New World, but some recent monographs have shown the diversity of other very closely related species in the genus, perhaps originating in the Balkans and Mediterranean coastal regions of Europe.
Tobacco A
The link between tobacco beetle and tobacco is likely to be fake, and it's a complete coincidence, because the beetle can easily change its food choices, from the dried leaves of one unknown plant to another. I've seen tobacco nails fly toward my lighted kitchen window, and there are no tobacco growers or cigarette factories around my house. Tobacco A clearly has a very wide range of food options, already known as raisins, rhubarb, peppers, ginger, dried fish, ergot, turmeric, cannonballs, licorice and safflower.
Many so-called dedicated insects occasionally choose a certain food ingredient that does not belong to their diet. In 1979, when a beetle hazard occurred at an anti-drug office in Arizona, USA, pest control officials found that the warehouse was filled with confiscated bundles of marijuana, but instead of finding any of the beetles commonly found in the marijuana, they were filled with hybrid grain thieves who ate cannabis seeds (Smith and Olson, 1982). The bundles were also infested with a wide variety of mold- and fungal beetles, and it is clear that Mexican smugglers stored it in the open without much care before smuggling it to the United States.
As civilization progresses (and luxuries emerge), it always seems that there will always be creatures waiting to take advantage of the benefits that come with it. Thankfully, tea has always had few insects, unlike coffee, which is severely damaged by the coffee bean elephant (Araecerus fasciculatus). The coffee bean elephant is native to India and was originally a pest of nutmeg. Chocolate (and cocoa) is eaten by the cocoa borer (Ephestia elutella), which is also known as the "tobacco meal borer" when it is found on tobacco. Bamboo furniture is popular in some places, and the bamboo beetle (Dinoderus minutus) will also follow, which is one of several kinds of bamboo-eating beetles in East Asia, which can eat the core of bamboo into powder.
Coffee beans resemble bamboo beetles
In the early 20th century, the telephone was certainly the highest symbol of modern life, but when telephone lines began to be erected on the streets of the United States, some exchanges suffered problems. It was soon discovered that a native wood borer cable beetle (Scobicia declivis) had been mothed into the sleeves of lead telephone cables in several suburbs of California. Usually, this small (5 mm to 6 mm long) insect is a wood-eating beetle, but the density and texture of lead must be very similar to that of wood, since they are trying to bite into a small hole in something that is inedible for laying eggs, yet the cable does not contain anything that the larvae can feed. They create small holes in the cable, only 2 mm to 3 mm in diameter, usually next to the cable support ring, which is an accessory fixed to the building, and this support point provides the cable beetle with the necessary lever to moth into the relatively soft metal.
The adults of the cable beetle feathered from planks and logs in their natural habitat in July and August, and although the damage to the cable did not appear to be large during these two months, the damage became apparent after the first rain arrived. Rainwater flows into the cables through the small holes they bite out, interfering with circuitry and causing phone failures in 50 to 600 homes at a time. Soon, the beetle gained a common name, the "short-circuit beetle" (also called the "lead-clad cable borer").
While it seems that no insect is really a computer pest, some "crazy" ants will treat the computer room as their home if they have the opportunity. There is an ant with a very strange name called Nylanderia fulva. The name comes from its swirling, zigzag frantic gait and from Tom Raspberry, a Texas pest control expert who first discovered its hazards. Native to South America, the Rasbury Mad Ants appeared in the United States in 1931, but did not become a pest until the 1990s. Now widely distributed in Texas, it is spreading to Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida (Gotzek et al., 2012).
Cable beetle
Its main annoying behavior is nesting in electrical equipment, but whether it is attracted to the magnetic field of the wires of these devices or by the warm internal environment associated with the resistance is still being studied. However, they have become notorious computer pests in the eyes of the media. The English word "bug" is used to refer to small vulnerabilities and flaws in computer programs, not only for the convenience of newspaper assistant editors, but also because it did originally have a real insect that was a "computer bug" (computer bug).
On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper, a computer scientist in the U.S. Navy, wrote in her diary that a moth had been found stuck in the relay of the Mark II computer she was developing, causing the computer to stop working. Although the term "troubleshoot" a system is "debugging" in English and literally means "deworming," this event pretty much solidifies the term we still use very conveniently today. The nocturnal moth, which is still pressed into the Smithsonian Institution's logbook in Washington, is most likely attracted to the light of a vacuum tube and then dried by exposed electrical joints. There is now evidence that it is the electric field (not the hot wire) that attracts cockroaches, clothesfish, house fish and salamanders, so the rumors of these insects flying and encroaching on electrical equipment and sockets are true, not complaints of dissatisfaction from arrogant owners who suffer from damage to the new modern living equipment in their homes. As for whether Mr. Rathbury's mad ants will still burrow into our laptops, it is unknown.
This article is excerpted from The Uninvited Guest