How Did Love Bugs Come About
By wayne wallace may 4 2011.
How did love bugs come about. But not even death can t disconnect these lovers and the female is left to drag around the male s body until she lays her eggs and dies a few days later. Beginning in the early to mid 1900s however they began to travel northward to the southeastern portions of the u s including florida texas louisiana georgia and as far north as north carolina. It is also known as the honeymoon fly or double headed bug during and after mating matured pairs remain together even in flight for up to several days. Most people in the southern united states are very familiar with the seasonal appearance of the slow moving pesky lovebug that is often seen in spring and fall attached to a mate and hovering near freeways and other byways with heavy traffic.
Where did love bugs come from. Where did love bugs come from. Love is a battlefield and being hit by my car isn t the only way love bugs pass onto the next world. Sometime in the 1950s an experiment gone horribly wrong at the university of florida produced a pesky bug with no apparent purpose.
Hardy but was seen in. Lovebugs are an invasive species native to central america. Where did love bugs come from. Gainesville fla fact or fiction.
Despite urban myths love bugs didn t come about from a cloning experiment they didn t escape from a research facility and they weren t bio engineered to attack mosquitoes. The male flies don t live very long and they die shortly after sex. The university of florida says they did not introduce the love bug to the state but that in the 20th century the bugs migrated from central america and traveled. Love bugs are not the result of a genetic cloning experiment gone wrong nor were they unwittingly loosed from a research facility charged with studying exotic insects.
The species was first described in 1940 by d. They made their way from the yucatan to southern louisiana in the 1920s and then ultimately to florida three. The university of florida says they did not introduce the love bug to the state but that in the 20th century the bugs migrated from central america and traveled. Originally love bugs were considered native only to south and central america.