The Animal That Can Wait a Year for You
The impossible claim This animal can wait up to 425 days between meals — and it has walked the Earth for 115 million years, since before the bats. The verified facts The bed bug (Cimex lectularius) is a flat, wingless, mahogany-brown insect that has honed one superpower: patience. Starvation experiments show adults can survive up to 425 days without a blood meal in cool conditions — and several months at room temperature. The family Cimicidae is ~115 million years old, tens of millions of years older than bats; bed bugs outlived the dinosaurs, hitched rides with cave-dwelling ancestors, and moved into our beds when we built houses close together. ...