Li'l Bitty Critters!

Aedes Mosquito

  You expect to find insects when you choose to live on a tropical island near the equator.  I'd been on the lookout for cockroaches, which were quite prevalent when I lived on Guam.  But I haven't seen even one of them here in our abode, for which I'm very grateful!  However, mosquitoes are all over the place.  I think we have a couple of pet mosquitoes that have taken up permanent residence in our "unit."  (That's "condo talk," by the way.  You don't live in an "apartment" here--you have a "unit."  So, despite having screens on every window but one, we have a pair of pet mosquitoes.  One, Willard, lives in the kitchen.  The other, Fred, cruises past my computer screen on a nightly basis.  But--hah!  No longer--I just crushed the life outa the li'l sucker!  Bye-bye, Fred, and good riddance!

    Normally, I don't try too hard to kill these speedy little skeeters.  They don't bother me much, since my thin-skinned husband seems to attract all of them and they never so much as touch me.  However, recently here in our well-maintained, clean condo complex we've had an abnormally large number of cases of dengue fever!  Five, to date, and all of them landed in the hospital.  I gather that you don't die from this tropical, mosquito-transmitted illness, but it isn't pleasant at all.   It's accompanied by a 104 or 105-degree fever, and Wikipedia cheerfully announces that it "rarely causes death and symptoms usually subside within a week."  Now, isn't THAT nice to know!?!

    Anyway, when I barreled out of here the other morning, there was a rather grim-looking group of uniformed local officials with clipboards moving around.  I asked the gate guard who they were and he said they were health officials, come to investigate why our complex has more cases of dengue fever than others.  Hmmm. . . .and we're planning on making this our semi-permanent home?  Might have to re-think that one!

    Meanwhile, a friend of ours encountered another nasty little insect and spent over a week recovering.  The li'l guy is called a rove beetle, and it looks small and innocent, wouldn't you agree?  But he's a really bad-*** character, this one.  If he stings you, he leaves some irritant behind that you can spread to other parts of your body simply by touching it.  Our friend must have been bitten while she was sleeping, 'cuz her back had a big red welt on it.  But she then must have rubbed her eye in her sleep, because it also became all swollen up and painful.  It took about a week for it to go down again!  I hear that this insect is the bane of the existence of high-rise condo dwellers because he moves around by being carried on wind currents, which they have a lot of up there on the high floors of fancy condos.  

    So, you just can't escape!  Live up high and the rove beetles get you.  Live down low (like us) and it's the dengue fever-bearing mosquitoes.  And if they don't get you, the crazy Penang drivers just might.


P.S. Early this morning, a bat stumbled onto our bedroom balcony.  Hubby bravely chased it away.  But it did cross my mind that if he were to take up residence there (the bat, NOT the hubby), perhaps we wouldn't have to worry so much about the smaller nasty critters that bite!