The bug outbreak: another item on the never-ending “worry list” of the Lebanese?

Analysis by Nour Chanouha, Contributor

May 26th, 2020

“After the coronavirus, prepare yourself for a locust invasion” were among the numerous viral posts Lebanese were quick to share on social media. As of the night of Friday May 15th 2020, bug swarms were seen flying across Lebanese villages and large numbers of small black insects had to be cleaned up from houses in several cities. Nearing three months of lockdown, Lebanese started to feel unsafe even in their homes.

With prices skyrocketing, coronavirus cases still on the rise and the garbage crisis making headlines again, can the Lebanese be blamed for panicking at the sight of these bug swarms and pointing fingers at the government for mishandling the country?

However, it has become apparent knowledge that the wave of swarming insects that is being observed in Lebanon is a natural phenomenon. Nevertheless, our unhealthy practices and the absence of a national management plan do not plead innocent in face of the recent bug outbreak. 

In a conversation with The Phoenix Daily, Dr Khouzama Knio, Chair of the Biology Department and Professor at the American University of Beirut, who has extensive years of experience in entomology research in Lebanon, asserts that the mass emergence of insects in Lebanon is concordant with their normal life cycle that follows seasonal climatic variations. In the cold season, insects go dormant and they need to accumulate certain heat units with the gradual increase in temperature in order to complete their life cycle, in other words to reach adulthood and emerge from the ground to reproduce and disperse. However, one of the side effects of global warming was that we had a cold long winter and a very short humid spring followed by a sudden rise in temperature that was notable last week in Lebanon. As a consequence, many insects reached adulthood and emerged from the ground at the same time, which caused the swarming we observed. 

Dr. Knio goes on to note that most of the insect species that emerged to reproduce are local species of beetles that are attracted by light at night. Some of them are cockroaches that also mistakenly follow the light and end up in houses where they lay their eggs. Most importantly, and what we have to keep in mind is that all of these species are harmless, even beneficial. “Only 0.5% of insects are blood sucking and potentially pathogenic for humans. Not only that, 90% of what we eat depends on pollination by insects”.

Dr Knio adds that insects have a fundamental role in maintaining a natural balance through recycling and decomposing matter and limiting herbivorous species that may affect our farmers' crops. Addressing the panick-induced and panick-inducing statements that Lebanese posted on social media about a potential locust invasion, Dr. Knio insists that this is highly improbable. The locust, commonly known as al-jarad in Arabic, exhibits a gregarious behavior when the drought settles in Africa: it migrates to more humid regions to reproduce.

However, nowadays, they reach Lebanon in very low numbers and die quickly because insecticides are being used in Africa to limit their spread. Should the Lebanese population fear and worry?

 Probably not. Or at least not at the sight of last week’s swarms of insects. However, worrying about how we are responding to such outbreaks and the long-term effect of mishandling them is completely justified, if not necessary.

Arguably the response to the outbreak to the Lebanese should have at least been an expected and official statement by the government dictating/guiding municipalities and citizens on how to eliminate the large number of beetles and cockroaches invading their neighborhoods while causing the least damage. The only statement came from Michel Frem, Director of the Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI), who highlighted to MTV the harmlessness of this infestation and warned against killing beetle species that are “beneficial and eat animals that harm crops”.

However and with the absence of a national management plan, his appeal was mere ink on paper as several municipalities rushed to spray large quantities of insecticides when swarms of insects invaded populated neighborhoods and camps like Ain el Helwe. Dr. Knio notes that sometimes the use of insecticides is inevitable, but we should be using selective rather than broad-range products that are even more harmful to us than to the insects. The excessive use of broad-range insecticides not only kills a wide diversity of beneficial species that we depend on and makes them prone to develop resistance, but also has its own set of harmful health hazards including notable side effects on the human nervous system. 

 Dr. Knio noted to the Phoenix Daily that she strongly endorses the implementation of healthy practices as a contingency plan to deal with such outbreaks in the future. These simply include turning off lights that attract those insects and closing windows, which some municipalities like that of Dekwene have called for. In addition, using nets on windows and refraining from leaving exposed stagnant sources of water that help insect species including mosquitos to reproduce are among the daily practices that can be adopted.

The mass emergence of local species of insects that we witnessed in Lebanon last week is merely a temporary natural phenomenon that the sudden rise in temperature mainly due to global warming has accelerated. Alternatively, what we should worry about are our unhealthy practices that continue to disrupt nature’s balance and contribute to global warming. It is these unhealthy practices that shifted mosquitos’ geographical distribution and brought species like the tiger mosquito that are vector of diseases from tropical regions where they originated, to the Mediterranean. It is not unlikely that we might witness a dengue or a yellow fever virus outbreak in Lebanon in the near future. Supposedly, the coronavirus pandemic must have taught us better.