The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Crunchy – Creepy Crawlies of the Rainy Season

No, unlike the volunteer in Newala, we did not find an eastern green mamba hanging from the beams inside our thatch roof – we’ll thankfully leave that story for another blog. But we did find a baby scorpion in our bathroom the other morning, probably hunting the ants that are often patrolling through the area. And a couple of weeks ago, I came into the bedroom to find a spider the size of my hand in one corner of the ceiling – crouching as though like he was making to spring at my head. He was more legs than body, but it didn’t make a difference to me – I got the bug spray.

The spider in our bedroom.

With the current rainy season, we’ve seen a proliferation of the insect life here on the hot, swampy southern coast. One of the few rewards of this “bounty,” if one can be said to exist, is the mass migration of butterflies that is passing through the region. Sitting at my desk at home, these big, colorful beauties bounce into my view through the window, as they stop and visit whatever plants we might have blooming in the front garden. And riding into town in the late afternoon, you’ll see thousands of butterflies, flying right over the city on their journey north. After their trip through the jungles of Mozambique and the Ruvumu mangroves, they are fat and strong, and rarely land for long. I guess they still have a long way to go, and I’m happy we can send them on their way with a little nectar from our front yard.

It being a tropical country, one also has to think about mosquitoes – and particularly the malaria carrying Anopheles type. With all the rain, Mtwara has no shortage of mosquitos, including our neighborhood and our house unfortunately. We had one Tanzanian suggest that we follow the national trend, and cut down the grass around our house, essentially to the dirt. He claimed the grass would attract mosquitos. I don’t know, maybe he’s right, but I would suspect the huge puddles of water around the neighborhood, left from the daily afternoon rain showers, have something to do with the problem.

But we’ve definitely had mosquitoes in our house, biting us at night, despite our mosquito netting. And then, a couple of weeks ago, just as we’re noticing what a problem it was becoming, Merritt happened to come down with a fever. We take malaria prophylaxis everyday, essentially a low-dose antibiotic, which should prevent us from getting sick, but it’s not guaranteed. When Merritt’s temperature spiked at 102.7° F, we were definitely nervous and decided for her to take the malaria self-test. Thankfully it came back negative, and Merritt seems to have recovered from whatever bug she had, but maybe we will have to get the grass cut anyway. Although I did recently here of another approach we could take for reducing the local mosquito population.…

I actually saw an article recently about some new research on a particular type of spider that preys upon the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito, which showed that this spiders are actually attracted to human odor, particularly, as this study found, the smell of dirty socks. Here’s the link to the story, but in case you miss it, here’s the key quote from one of the researchers in the study, Fiona Cross from the University of Canterbury, describing the hunting abilities of the East African jumping spider: “When they smell blood, they can launch into feeding frenzies where they kill up to 20 mosquitoes in rapid succession.”

Dirty socks, eh? Who knew that not doing the laundry and forgoing washing the sheets might be the solution to our mosquito problem? Personally, I was starting to suspect that might be part of the problem.

The East African jumping spider, Evarcha culicivora. I'm
positive I’ve seen these little suckers around our house.

Another somewhat welcome predator of the proliferation of insects is our “jusi,” which are little tropical geckos that are everywhere. They seem to also have found a way into our house, and we have one that we’ve watched grow from the size of a worm to now three or four inches. Lately, this lizard has appeared in our bedroom, hanging on the window screen, slurping up any stray flies. As you can see, we have a veritable circus of insects and their predators in our house.

"Jusi"

But at least there’s the one thing that we’ve thankfully managed to keep from our house – the termites. Now, I recognize that some of you reading this blog already know a thing or two about termites and swarming termites – but these are like the B-17s of termites and their swarm is like the pre-dawn bombardment of the German defenses on Normandy on D-Day. Their bodies aren’t all that much bigger then the typical termite, but its the wings that give it the effect – two oversized sets that create the sound of crumpling newspaper when they’re swarming.

A couple of nights we’ve left our outside light on too long after they’ve started up for the night, and we ended up with a cloud of them around our house. The first time this happened, we turned out the outdoor lights but kept our indoor lights on, curtains drawn. Result: determined to get the next source of light, the termites crawled in between the layers of mosquito netting on our windows and then, now trapped, proceeded to die. The next day, swarms of ants came and cleaned up the gross mess.

Another time we didn’t turn of the lights when the termites started swarming, some kids from the neighborhood came up onto our porch to set buckets of water up under the light, as a trap to catch the falling insects. It was then that I learned that people actually eat these things – apparently they’re quite popular at this time of year, fried up in a big batches until crunchy. We’ve since seen the kids amassing at a neighbor’s house, under their outdoor florescent lamp, swatting the termites into buckets. It’s quite the scene.

So while the inundation of insect life may seem like a nightmare, they’re all relatively harmless (except the mosquitoes, of course), and for some people, they’re even a blessing, an extra source of protein in the middle of the labor-intensive planting season. If we can just remember to turn out our lights when the termites start swarming, I think we’ll be able to tolerate it.