By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

The love bug’ll get ya!

There are many seasonal harbingers in the world. Budding Dogwood trees are one of the first signs of spring, a marked rise in vandalism and an increase in juvenile delinquency lets you know it is summer time and school is out.

The local drug store breaking out pallets of candy corn, candy pumpkins and cheap vinyl “Star Wars” costumes lets you know that Fall and Halloween are only a couple months away, and television ads featuring electric shavers sledding through snow-drenched meadows heralds the fact that Christmas isn’t far off.

There is another kind of seasonal harbinger out there, the biannual type, not the sort of event that shows up in bold print on your desk calendar, but something that happens nonetheless with certain regularity, that tells us time is marching on. The swallows returning or leaving the mission at San Juan Capistrano is one of these type events. There is another and kind of similar biannual swarm here in south Alabama, and I believe it is the preeminent event of this kind at least in the insect world. I just finished spraying about three hundred or so of that phenomenon off the grill of my truck.

Entomologists call them Plecia nearctica, but the rest of us just call them lovebugs. I got to pondering the plight of the lovebug today as I spent 45 minutes of an all-too-short weekend spraying their locked-in-copulation carcasses from the grill and hood of both my wife’s and my vehicles. It looks like a freight train piled into a insect porn film set, and this happens hundreds of thousands of times a day on the roads of the South during lovebug season.

Or it begs of a scene of a buggy Pompeii with hundreds of bodies of lovebugs doing what they do best frozen in time by the effects of the grill of my Toyota accelerating them to 65 mph at an instant.

To be accurate, the lovebug is not actually a bug but a fly. I did a little research and found that these love-flies spend most of their lives burrowed in your sod, eating pieces of dead grass. Some life huh? Then twice a year when all that dead Centipede and St. Augustine has served as an aphrodesiac, the aeronautical love machines take to the skies to join their version of the mile high club, which seems to take place over every roadway in the Gulf south in May and September.

I’m not sure what draws love bugs to the paved transit corridors of our road network or if they are actually omnipresent and we just seem to notice them more when they splat into our windshields as we make our way down the road. It is weird, I feel absolutely no remorse from sending scores of these critters to their great reward. I will do some stunt driving to avoid a turtle or frog on the highway, but damn if I do nothing more than spray some cleaner fluid and swish my wipers to clear the crime scene as I lay out countless numbers of lovebugs on my daily travels.

The automobile is one of the most usefull inventions in modern times. Our motor vehicles let us move freight and people over great distances and at high rates of speed, but they also may be saving us from a world-ending swarm of lovebugs. Think about this next time you walk around the front of your car in late spring or late summer; you may have, with just your hood, saved humanity.

Take some time to marvel at all the lovebugs you took out and pat yourself on the back, job well done! I wonder if our $4-a-gallon-gasoline-powered shiny cocoons are the only thing between us and an world ending epidemic of lovebugs. If we didn’t cut as many of the double-headed horde out of the herd as we do now would their numbers grow so much that they would block out the sun and put us into some sort of seasonal insect winter?

These are the hard questions that you need to ponder when cleaning their coupled carcasses off your vehicle. We humans may soon realize that our cars are the only thing between us and the lovebugs total domination of the planet. So gas up hit the roadways and do your part to save us all.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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