Neighborhood has gone to the bugs
Researchers test insect-fighting technologies

Dan Morse, Washington Post

Sunday, January 15, 2006

 

Catonsville , Md. -- Some neighbors call it the bughouse because an estimated 70,000 or more bugs live inside the place, tucked away here in a residential neighborhood.

There are cockroaches, ants, beetles, lice, bedbugs, mosquitoes, moths, mites and more -- all crawling and flying through glass and mesh cages.

Eight entomologists and their assistants tend to them, walking among a warren of small rooms. The scientists use the bugs to test the latest insecticides, bug-snuffing gizmos and repellents mailed in from pest-control companies nationwide.

The firm, Insect Control & Research Inc., has been around 59 years. A half-dozen other such companies exist. But with zoning laws and industrial parks and people leery of differences next door, it's hard to imagine a bug lab so quietly doing its business on a suburban street.

"I don't really understand what they do. I just know they do bug research," says Jim Morsberger, who for 20 years has lived across the street from the two-story red-brick building 40 miles north of Washington.

Morsberger recalls one issue with a loud burglar alarm and another with an errant snowplow operator, but he came away from each incident mostly struck by how quickly the scientists corrected anything intrusive. "Corporate-wise, you don't know those guys exist, except to say, 'Hey, how are you?' " Morsberger says.

One reason for the coexistence is that Insect Control & Research predates many residents. It was formed in 1946 by entomologist Eugene Gerberg. He had just returned from the war, serving as commanding officer of a malaria detachment in the Pacific, where his duties included finding mosquito breeding areas and making sure soldiers used repellents and took pills.

In Maryland, he faced an early land-use spat but says he came out properly zoned. During the Vietnam War, working inside the building, he kept mosquitoes infected with bird malaria for government testing. The mosquitoes were housed in screened cages. He backed up those with a series of adjoining rooms, four layers deep, each with screening material and doors.

"Our lab was the one the government sent people to see good mosquito security," Gerberg, 86, says in an interview from Gainesville, Fla., where he is an adjunct professor of medical entomology at the University of Florida.

The bird malaria mosquitoes are long gone, but the strange layout remains. Scientists negotiate mazelike turns going about their business. Drab colors adorn cinderblock walls. The upstairs paneling is dingy. But the building is oddly clean, with few if any stray bugs walking the cement and tile floors.

One night in the early 1990s, though, about 50 black imperial scorpions purchased from a supplier slipped from their buckets. They probably stood up on the sides of the buckets, knocking them over. Robin Todd, who succeeded Gerberg as director, remembers arriving to see an assistant holding a pair of tweezers, saying, "We've got a bunch of loose scorpions."

The scorpions weren't lethal, but a sting could ruin anyone's day, Todd says. The scorpions were contained to a bug-rearing room and eventually were accounted for. (The lab doesn't usually keep scorpions.)

Todd, 57, who grew up in England, gave a reporter a tour through the lab recently.

"This is the insectory. Hey, Fouad," he says, addressing Fouad Zgidou, a technician from Morocco.

Zgidou sits before a wire mesh cage. He snakes a hose into it, gently vacuuming up one mosquito at a time. He transfers them live into disposable cylinders, each about the size of a coffee cup and made of cardboard tubing, mesh screens and pliable dental dams that serve as sealable doorways. The cylinders are headed upstairs to a stainless steel gas chamber the size of a small backyard shed, which will be used to test a pulse-spray insecticide system akin to backyard sprinklers.

Adjacent to Zgidou's room is a long-running colony of body lice. Companies like Tec Laboratories Inc., in Albany, Ore., have counted on them. Several years ago, Tec Laboratories sent packages of its Licefreee! hair gel to see how it did on nits. "One hundred percent mortality," says the company's Maria Steckley, reading from a report pulled from her quality-control office.

Todd next heads into the Roach Room. Among the colonies lined up are Madagascar hissing roaches, which feed on smashed Purina rat chow. Keeping all specimens hearty is a lab hallmark, clients say, as is its breadth of bug offerings and detailed testing.

When the scientists test "roach bombs," which are used to fumigate large areas, they take the roaches to a large room with an observation window and place them in five-gallon buckets. The buckets can't be covered with mesh; that would impede the test. Researchers coat the inner bucket walls with margarine or mixes of kerosene and petroleum jelly, then set off the fogger. The roaches scramble but can't get out. The lab disposes of dead bugs in a regular trash bin.

After the Roach Room, Todd takes several sharp turns to the Fly Room, run by longtime employee Gloria Stevens. She dips a cotton swab into a container of bovine blood recently fetched from a nearby kosher slaughterhouse. She places the swab on the screened roof of a colony of stable flies. They swarm upward, munching through the screen.

"This is getting pretty old," she says, looking at a container of blood. "I need to get it fresh tomorrow."

Back at the lab, Todd and his scientists raise so many bugs, they also sell them. They unloaded nearly two pounds of frozen mosquitoes for several thousand dollars to a company that collects allergenics that often end up in product development. They've sold cockroach droppings as well, an enterprise that requires graded cage floors and a collection area. The scientists also consult for pest-control companies and help them with regulatory registrations.

But what people really want to hear at cocktail parties is how well various products work. Todd doesn't like ultrasonic noise devices, which ostensibly ward off bugs with high-pitched sounds. Nor does he like repellent-covered wristbands, which he says protect only wrists.

As for outdoor mosquito zappers, he says they tend to incinerate other kinds of bugs. "I think they're a complete waste of money," he says.

He generally likes DEET-based repellents.

Todd's business often increases after bad bug press. Recent attention has focused on bedbugs, which people can pick up at hotels. Todd recently lectured on the subject at the Entomological Society of America's annual convention in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Todd's lab has kept its own colony of bedbugs since 1983. For years, they were essentially unused. "It's kind of like wine," Todd says. "You put a bottle down and, low and behold, years later it produces a fine vintage."

The bughouse isn't the only place where tests are run. In the early 1990s, companies told Todd they wanted field studies. He began rounding up local testers.

Rowland Bowers, 56, a home-improvement contractor, began going on trips in 1998 to supplement his income and spend time with tester friends like Dennis Bowers, his cousin. He has since traveled to Assateague Island in Virginia, the deep woods of Maine, the Florida Everglades, Minnesota, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, Oregon and Washington state. "The mosquitoes in Assateague are the worst. I personally think they bite harder," he says.

Bowers takes about four trips a year. He earns $11 an hour, mostly by sitting on a lawn chair, his body covered head to toe in double layers of clothing and netting -- save for an exposed patch of arm or leg that is treated with repellent.

Sometimes he gets a relatively ineffective repellent to test. After two bug bites -- as confirmed and timed by the scientists -- he is free to go for the day. When he gets a strong repellent, he can sit for as long as eight hours.

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