Infestations

In this Ohio city, it seems, it really is tough to stop the bedbugs from biting. When complaints about the bloodsucking insects first trickled in to Cincinnati's public health department three years ago, officials assumed it was an anomaly -- or perhaps the overactive imagination of a bug-phobic public. After all, Cimex lectularius had all but vanished here by the 1950s because of the frequent use of DDT and other now-banned pesticides.

When Bonnie Friedman first heard about New York's burgeoning bedbug problem, she felt lucky to live in an upscale neighborhood. "I remember thinking, 'I'm so glad I live in Brooklyn Heights. I will never get a bedbug,' " Friedman said. Her first bite came a few weeks later. And as many others have learned, getting rid of the tiny intruders is often a months-long odyssey that requires equal parts detective work, obsessive-compulsive cleaning strategies and emotional healing.

Normally, this would be the beginning of the busy season at Jim Nadeau's ice-sculpting company. But when the phone rings, Nadeau tells confused Chicago-area brides and party planners that they might want to postpone their events. "The cicadas are coming!" he tells them. "You don't know how disgustingly bad they can be," said Nadeau, 53, who has been carving ice figures for 27 years in Forest Park, Ill.

The record-breaking dry weather is driving all manner of creepy, crawly things much closer to humans. Swimming pools and outdoor ponds are attracting bugs and thirsty rodents. Possums, even raccoons, are venturing closer to human habitation, hoping to find a leaking faucet or open garbage can, vegetable garden or bowl of pet food. "Bugs and rodents need food and water," said Todd Veden, a technical specialist for Terminex, a pest control company.

The worst summer flooding in years has claimed more than 400 lives and wreaked billions of dollars in damage in central China. Here in the villages around Dongting Lake, rising waters have brought a plague of biblical proportions: an invasion of 2 billion mice. The rodents have been on the march in Hunan province since late June, when waters submerged mouse holes surrounding China's second-largest lake.

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.

There's more than one way to bag a bedbug, or to sniff them out so the bagging can begin. Matt and Matti of Huntington Beach -- beagles trained at the University of Florida Gainesville -- are two examples. A beagle is a renowned aroma hound (although the Peanuts cartoon character Snoopy, "the world's most famous beagle," wasn't best known for being olfactorial), and with education is able to catch a whiff of the sweet yet musty scent of a bedbug.

The pine trees cradling this mountain town are dying, turned rusty red by a beetle that is destroying the Rockies' forests. The brittle corpses are an eyesore as well as a major fire hazard. When they collapse, they make hillsides unstable, increasing erosion and damming streams that feed into the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to seven states and Mexico. But Randy Piper is trying to focus on the positive. He moved here four years ago, scanned the hillsides and saw opportunity.

An invasive mussel first detected in California less than a year ago has surged across the state's southern counties, stirring concern that its spread will inflict costly damage to public water systems and fisheries statewide. The infamous fresh-water quagga mussel, which has wreaked havoc in the Great Lakes, multiplies so quickly and prolifically that it forms large masses that can clog water pumps, pipelines, power plant intakes and farm irrigation lines.

Experts see signs that the infestation of Mormon crickets that has plagued Nevada for six straight years, with swarms stretching across millions of acres, may decrease this summer. The insects, which got their name after nearly destroying the crops of Utah's Mormon settlers in 1848, infested about 12 million acres in Nevada last year, roughly the same acreage infested in 2004. That made last year the first since 2000 that the acreage didn't substantially increase.