Environment
The Urban Heat Island Could Be Attracting Bugs
The hotter neighborhoods of Raleigh are awash in scale insects, an ominous indicator of how bug populations might swell in a globally warmer world.
We often think of cities as dampening zones for wildlife, with bustling human activity and inhospitable concrete surfaces keeping many critters at a distance. But in reality the opposite might be the case, at least for insects: They seem to love basking in the toasty air of the urban heat island.
That's the take-away of a new study out of Raleigh conducted by Emily Meineke at North Carolina State University and entomology enthusiasts around the state. Meineke and friends wanted to know if urban pest outbreaks had anything to do with the warm air wafting off of cities. So they set their sights on Parthenolecanium quercifex, or the oak lecanium, a type of scale insect whose extreme slothfulness makes it the Al Bundy of the bug world.