Pest Facts

Albuquerque & Rio Rancho, NM

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Here, we have compiled a few Pest Facts. Some are entertaining, yet most are informative. Some you may have known and others, maybe not?…

While most spiders are solitary animals, there are some that form communities building large communal cobwebs. Colonies can number in the thousands of individuals and they will work together to incapacitate prey trapped in their webs and share the harvest with each other.
Some cicadas can make sounds nearly 120 decibels loud!
The dance known as the tarantella is thought by some to have originated from the belief during the 16th and 17th centuries that the bite of a certain kind of wolf spider (named “tarantula,” being found in the Taranto region of Italy) would be fatal unless the victim engaged in frenzied dancing to certain music.
The life cycle of a mosquito features four stages, egg, larva, pupa and adult. Female mosquitoes drink blood in order to obtain nutrients needed to produce eggs.
The normal size of an adult Brown Recluse Spider is ¼ – ¾ inch (6 -19 millimeters), but some specimens will grow bigger. The body coloration of the Brown recluse spider varies from brown to a light tan shade, and there are markings on the dorsal side of the cephalothorax. One less known Brown recluse spider fact is that it is called Violin spider or Fiddleback spider in some parts of the country since it has a violin shaped decoration that starts in the form of a black line at the dorsal side of its cephalothorax. The neck of the violin points to the rear of the animal. The violin marking is not visible in all spiders, and it is therefore unwise to relay solely on it when trying to determine the species.
The number of insect species is believed to be between six and ten million.
Insect bodies have three parts, the thorax, abdomen and head.
Odorous house ants are common in California north to Washington and are the most common pest ant in the mid-south region of Arkansas and West Tennessee. They may be encountered occasionally throughout the Midwestern United States.
Only male crickets chirp.
Roaches are thigmotropic, meaning they like feeling something solid in contact with their bodies, preferably on all sides. They seek out cracks and crevices, and will squeeze into spaces that offer them the comfort of a tight fit. And I do mean a tight fit. The small German cockroach can fit into a crack as thin as a dime, while the larger American cockroach will squeeze into a space no thicker than a quarter. Even a pregnant female can manage a crevice as thin as two stacked nickels.
African weaver ants can haul prey weighing more than 1,000 times their own weight up trees to their nests mainly through the aid of large adhesive pads on each foot.
An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight. If a 175-pound man had the comparative strength of an ant, he could lift four tons.
Ants leave trails and communicate with each other using pheromones as chemical signals.
Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica.
Black widows are known for cannibalizing their mates, but this doesn’t actually happen all the time. The exception seems to be the red widow, where the male force feeds himself to the female by placing himself into her mandibles. If she ‘spits him out,’ so to speak, he will keep placing himself there until she eventually eats him.
Cockroaches are scavengers. While most roaches prefer sweets given a choice, in a pinch, they will eat just about anything: glue, grease, soap, wallpaper paste, leather, bookbindings, or even hair. Worse yet, a cockroach can survive a remarkably long time without food. Some species can go as long as 6 weeks without a meal! These traits make cockroaches in our homes tough to control. But in nature, cockroaches provide an important service by consuming organic waste. They’re the garbage collectors of their habitat.
Cockroaches can live for weeks without their heads! As crazy as this sounds, entomologists have actually decapitated roaches to study this phenomena. Lop the head off a roach, and a week or two later it will still respond to stimuli by wiggling its legs. Why? Because the head of a roach isn’t all that important to how it functions. Cockroaches have open circulatory systems, so as long as the wound clots normally, they aren’t prone to bleeding out. Their respiration occurs via spiracles along the sides of the body. And they can survive without eating for weeks. Eventually, the cockroach will either dehydrate or succumb to mold.
Fire ants appear to sting all at the same time. This is because they are sensitive to vibration or movement and tend to sting once they object they are on moves. Fire ants swarm onto a body part and when one ant stings, the body party moves causing all other ants to sting in response.
Fire ants currently infest 14 states in the southern portion of the U.S.
Humans will typically find the webs of Brown Recluse Spiders in garages, sheds, woodpiles and similar placed where the spider will be left undisturbed by human activity most of the day. It appreciates human made shelters and the rain-free environment.
A reliable way of determining whether or not a spider is a recluse spider is to look at its eyes. A majority of the worlds’ spiders have eight eyes, while recluse spiders have no more than six. The eyes are arranged in pairs; two lateral pairs and one median pair. This is an important Brown recluse spider fact since this type of arrangement can be seen in just a small number of spider species, such as the scytodids. Separating scytodids from recluses is however not difficult, since the legs and abdomen of a recluse spider never display any coloration pattern. The legs are also without spines.

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