Love doesn’t keep them together.
But sex does.
Yes, lovebugs are at it again, coupling in the air and on window screens, patio furniture and especially vehicles.
The bugs — a march fly now common to the southeastern United States and Central America — show up in large numbers in late April and May and again in September.
Lovebugs dig humid spaces and hot surfaces.
They don’t bite or sting and do us no physical harm.
Actually, the bugs can be beneficial to us — their pollinators and the larvae feed on decaying vegetation in the landscape.
Still, people generally don’t show the love for the bugs that can remain paired for days.
The exceptions might be carwash operators, who get the business generated in the spring and fall, when lovebugs swarm and splatter windshields, clog radiator grills and leave a slightly acidic residue.
The purveyors of fake news like them, too.
Lovebugs are native to Central America and likely arrived to the Gulf Coast on ships. Research documents their presence in Louisiana in 1911 and Florida in the later 1940s.
But check social media forums and you’ll find plenty of posts circulating about “lovebugs” being the result of a genetic experiment gone awry, usually at the University of Florida.
One variation of the false post reads, “Lovebugs are actually manmade. Scientists were genetically engineering females of a species of insect that would mate with the male mosquito but be sterile and produce no offspring. Unfortunately, they accidentally also created a male lovebug and a pair somehow escaped into the wild. Since the bugs had no natural predators, their numbers quickly exploded into the millions.”
Another claim plays on historic school rivalry along with false news: “Back when I was a student at the Florida State, I was told that lovebugs were accidentally released from a biological experiment station at the University of Florida.”
A couple of years ago, the Orlando Sentinel reported on the lovebug rumors and quoted a professor who said if the University of Florida had engineered lovebugs, they wouldn’t be black and red. They’d be blue and orange.
This is interesting, because just yesterday I saw a two-headed spider and can you guess its color?