Bugs Spotted
8 July 2008
Beetles can carry ten times their weight!
A couple of days ago I arrived at work to find the office in disarray. This seemed especially odd to me. Perhaps we had been visited by mischievous elves during the night, or maybe an earthquake that I missed while driving on the bumpy freeway. I usually listen to podcasts during my commute, so I could have missed the news.
It turned out that someone had discovered a palmetto bug on the floor and had trapped it under the lid of an “olla” (a traditional Mexican clay bean-pot). You may be asking yourself, “What is a Palmetto bug?” A Palmetto bug is just a really big cockroach…that flies… a giant, flying, mutant cockroach. If you are from the south of the United States, you know what a Palmetto bug is, so it is more likely that your first question was, “Why would you have a traditional Mexican bean-pot in your office?” Fair enough: Our office houses the local office of the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (more about that in future postings) and the bean pot, of which the lid was now serving as an insect trap, is coated in lead-containing glaze. It had been removed from a home in which a child with lead poisoning lives. We now use the lid for educational purposes. We have a lot of potlucks, so sometimes it is tempting to use the bean pot for cooking, but that would be plumb loco, so we don’t.
Coincidentally, I happened upon another the evening before the above-described incident. This bug was about 4 m long and 1.5 m high and was carrying a very large box and several shipping pallets.
