Caveman Forecaster is a blog about “the art and science of time series analysis and forecasting.” There was a post about a month ago about bedbugs that really piqued my interest. It seems that bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) were virtually eradicated in the US fifty years ago, but are making a comeback. That has even led to the organization of a National Bedbug Summit, which took place last month. The post was mostly about using Google search data to monitor and predict the seasonal outbreaks and longer-term trends. But it got me looking into the reasons for the resurgence, and wikipedia has a reasonable summary of that, with plenty of references. Basically, genetic diversity studies suggest that there was never complete eradication, but that the pesticide-resistant populations moved to alternate hosts, “have slowly been propagating in poultry facilities, and have made their way back to human hosts via the poultry workers.” So here’s another example of a human pest which can also hang out with agrobiodiversity, and jump back and forth.