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Bedbugs have been sucking blood for 115 million years, dating back to the days of the dinosaurs. That’s long before the first appearance of bats, one of their preferred hosts nowadays, meaning the mammals weren’t the first to receive a bedbug bite, researchers reported yesterday (May 16) in Current Biology.
“This is something that people have suspected, but it’s really nice to have it in black and white,” Christiane Weirauch, a systematic entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the new study, tells Science. Aside from pushing the date of the first bedbug bite back millions of years, the study also gives clues about the insect’s encounters with humans.
To perform the study, Klaus Reinhardt, an entomologist at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, and colleagues collected and analyzed genetic samples from 34 bedbug species and used the data to create the ...
