October 21, 2008
By Natalie Angier
The New York Times
With his soft voice and friar's manner, Louis Sorkin hardly seems the type to flout the sensible advice of a nursery rhyme. Yet on a recent afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Sorkin, a renowned entomologist, did precisely, luridly that.
He took a glass jar swarming with thousands of hungry specimens of Cimex lectularius, better known as bedbugs. The small, roachy-looking bloodsuckers have been spreading through the nation's homes and hotels at such a hyperventilated pace that by next year they are expected to displace cockroaches and termites as America's leading domestic pest insect. To better understand their habits, Mr. Sorkin has cultivated a personal bedbug colony—very personal.
... Mr. Sorkin and his bedbugs are featured in the newly published "Dark Banquet," a jaunty, instructive and charmingly graphic look at nature's born phlebotomists—creatures from wildly different twigs of the phylogenetic tree that all happen to share a fondness for blood.
The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database.
