Infestations

Bed feeling a little crowded? Maybe you have company. The Cimex lectularius, better known and despised as the common bedbug, is snuggling into households across Southern California, giving people the heebie- jeebies. The blood-sucking, heat-seeking, pint-size parasites aren't believed by the experts to transmit disease, but they do have a way of cranking up stress levels.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has weathered a lot of criticism over the years, but nothing like the broadside that hit it from inside. A departing executive in the firm's London office accused Goldman in a newspaper column Wednesday of losing its moral compass and being overtaken by a greed-infested corporate culture. "I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it," Greg Smith, who quit as head of the firm's U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times.

John K. Czechowski says he is really bugged about the extermination of termites that started this week at the city-owned Emerald Cove senior citizens' housing complex. Claiming there are dangers in the process, the 74-year-old Czechowski has vowed to sit tight in his book-filled apartment until officials assure him that the city will pay all damages to his belongings that the process might cause and assure him that fumigation is safe. "I'm not going to move," he said Friday.

The giant black metal gate slams shut, click, locked, leaving the scrubbed faces of the Sacred Heart High basketball players alone with the weathered streets of Lincoln Heights. The girls collectively sigh. They shake away the worry that stretches from the bob in their ponytails to the dirt on their sneakers. They begin their daily journey. For the next 15 minutes or so, covering a mile that feels like a marathon, the 10 players will walk or jog through a neighborhood that will stare and scowl.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was 1935, and grayback beetles were ravaging northeast Australia's vast sugar cane fields. So an enterprising entomologist named Reg Mungomery imported a crate of 101 tropical toads called Bufo marinus from Honolulu. Mungomery said that the toads would eat the bugs. He forgot one thing: Beetles fly; toads don't. Today, while insecticides control the beetles, nothing stops the toads.

Leaders of California's $1.6-billion citrus industry said Monday that a disease that was killing orchards worldwide was now rooted in Mexico, and experts warned that it was headed toward the state. Citrus greening disease has infected six citrus trees on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, spread by an infestation of the Asian citrus psyllid. There's a virtual insect highway across the width of Mexico, and once the aphid-like insect hops on, California is in trouble, said Beth Grafton-Cardwell, a UC Riverside entomologist and director of the Lindcove Research and Extension Center, east of Visalia.

California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying. The California Department of Food and Agriculture will deploy the wasps, no bigger than a grain of rice, in San Luis Obispo and Sacramento counties and may expand the program to other counties with more serious infestations. The wasps lay their eggs inside light-brown apple moth eggs, where they incubate until the larvae emerge and kill the developing moths.

What if you threw a bedbug party and everybody came? That's kind of what happened at the two-day Bedbug University: North American Summit in Rosemont, Ill. About 200 people were turned away from the sold-out session that brought together diverse professionals such as medical researchers and exterminators, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. How you get rid of bedbugs, which can cause nasty red welts, was addressed by 50 or so vendors who displayed their techniques at killing the critters.

Northern San Joaquin Valley farmers and agricultural commissioners went on alert this week after glassy-winged sharpshooters were found in San Jose. Officials trapped nine adult sharpshooters and found a nymph and an egg mass in San Jose during the last two weeks. Adding to the concern, officials have been unable to locate the source of the infestation. The sharpshooter carries the bacteria for Pierce's disease, which chokes a plant's ability to absorb water and nutrients.

They're nearly always pregnant, like the mythical tribbles of "Star Trek" fame. They pass through gullets of fish unfazed. And they could bring disaster to native bugs, frogs and steelhead restoration efforts in the Santa Monica Mountains. New Zealand mudsnails have taken over four watersheds in the Santa Monica Mountains and are spreading fast, expanding from the first confirmed sample in Medea Creek in Agoura Hills to nearly 30 other stream sites in four years. The invasive species, found in many waterways in the U.S. West, the Great Lakes and Canada, reproduces asexually, so "it just takes one to infest a water body," said Mark Abramson, a stream restoration expert for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission.

For roughly 24 hours, Facebook's news feed was not a family-friendly place. Facebook acknowledged Tuesday that the social networking site was briefly infested with a mix of hard-core pornographic images, doctored pictures of celebrities in sexual situations, photos of extreme violence and even a picture of a beaten dog. Facebook said it had identified the problem — if not the culprit. During the attack, users mistakenly downloaded programming language that resulted in their sharing offensive images on Facebook without knowing it, a company spokesman said, adding that the website's engineers were working on a fix. Facebook said it built mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and will put users who were affected by the offensive spam through "educational checkpoints" so they know how to protect themselves.

Zone One A Novel Colson Whitehead Doubleday: 260 pp., $25.95 Colson Whitehead really couldn't have picked a better time to write a zombie novel. Even looking past its Halloween-adjacent release date, "Zone One" comes at a time when such horrors are enjoying a pop culture renaissance that arguably began with Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" in 2002. In recent years the fascination has grown to include fan conventions, groaningly slouched "zombie walks" through city streets and the splatter-core success of AMC's adaptation of the graphic novel series, "The Walking Dead," which drew record ratings in its season premiere.

It started when an El Monte woman called to report an unusual pest: tiny mosquitoes that she said were biting her in the middle of the day. The complaint last week raised red flags for technicians at the San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District, who know that common mosquitoes typically attack during morning and evening hours. When a worker arrived at Dodson Street, one of the insects landed on his partner, so he trapped it in a plastic jar. "He took a close look at it, and he realized we might have a problem," said Kelly Middleton, a district spokeswoman.

The largest river restoration ever attempted in the West — intended to support a cornucopia of wildlife and outdoor activities — has left a 62-mile stretch of the Lower Owens so overrun with cattails, cane and bulrushes that it may take decades to bring them under control. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa turned a knob in 2006 that opened a diversion dam gate about 235 miles north of the city, putting water back into a river essentially left dry after its flows of Sierra snowmelt were diverted to the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913.

Linda Cree and her husband haven't dared to go outside to sit by their pool in the two months since furry black bats began invading their Moorpark backyard. They found three drowned in the pool, she said. Some flopped around on the ground in a pitiful death dance before growing still. She found one clinging to her screen door when she went out to get the morning paper, said Cree, 65, a homemaker. Of the eight bats she reported to Animal Control, seven tested positive for rabies.

California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying. The California Department of Food and Agriculture will deploy the wasps, no bigger than a grain of rice, in San Luis Obispo and Sacramento counties and may expand the program to other counties with more serious infestations. The wasps lay their eggs inside light-brown apple moth eggs, where they incubate until the larvae emerge and kill the developing moths.

Five nationally known experts in the study of red fire ants will tour ant-infested areas of Orange County today to assess the danger from the aggressive species that has colonized nurseries, backyards, parks and fields in several cities. The experts were invited by officials at the California Department of Food and Agriculture who are concerned about the ant outbreak, the largest and most widespread ever recorded in California.

A chemical assault on an invasive seaweed that threatened marine life along the coast appears promising, marine researchers said. An initial treatment of concentrated chlorine has killed patches of the plant and much of its roots. The plant has been flourishing in a half-acre of the Agua Hedionda Lagoon, 20 miles north of San Diego. Scientists estimate it will take at least three months to completely rid the lagoon of the plant.

They complain of mysterious, creepy symptoms: bugs — or some form of infestation — crawling beneath their skin, sometimes burrowing to the surface, leaving odd specks and colored filaments in their wake. They have flocked to websites to share details of their malady, which they call Morgellons disease; they have charged the medical community with ignoring their plight and have strong-armed the government into studying it. They go from doctor to doctor, carrying specimens in Ziploc bags and on glass slides, desperate to find a physical cause.

Could new cars have come with spiders? Mazda's spider problem could be the result of an infestation by the venomous arachnid at an auto parts supplier or the Flat Rock, Mich., plant where the automaker assembles its Mazda6 cars, rather than at the garages of owners, an entomologist said. This week, Mazda Motor Corp. said it would recall 65,000 cars to fix a problem with spiders nesting in tiny rubber hoses linked to fuel tank systems that could cause pressurization and ventilation problems in certain cars.