Bedbugs may have been one of the first urban pests
By Jake Buehler
MAY 27, 2025 AT 7:01 PM
The earliest cities may have had plenty of parasitic, six-legged tenants.
Common bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) experienced a dramatic jump in population size around the time humans congregated in the first cities. The wee bloodsuckers were probably the first insect pests to flourish in a city environment and possibly one of the first urban pests overall, researchers report May 28 in Biology Letters.
Originally, bedbugs fed on bats. But around 245,000 years ago, one lineage took up a human diet (probably starting with Neandertals) and never looked back. About a decade ago, urban entomologist Warren Booth of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and his colleagues extracted and analyzed the genomes of bedbugs from both lineages to aid future research on the insects’ evolutionary history. The team was interested in how organisms adapt to urban life, and bedbugs, as widespread indoor insects today, were a good example to study.
About a year ago, when Lindsay Miles — also at Virginia Tech — analyzed the genetic data to estimate past changes in bedbug population size, there were some surprises, Booth says. The team expected to see population drops about 19,000 years ago around the end of the last expansion of Ice Age glaciers due to environmental changes like habitat loss. While both lineages declined, the human lineage took a sharp upswing around 13,000 years ago, plateaued and then spiked again 7,000 years ago. In contrast, the bat lineage is still declining.
“Something different happened with human-associated bedbugs that caused that increase,” Booth says.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bedbugs-first-urban-pests