Bug out!

[robinbloke]

Once again it's thunderbug season; once again thousands of pesky little flying black bugs get everywhere I have three lodged between the layers of my LCD screen monitor at home and I have no idea how to get rid of them.

Every year about the same time, zillions of the pests.

Or how many exactly? Lets see, shall we kids?

With a quick check of the surrounding area I estimate at least one bug per 20 cm³ area, and that's being conservative. Which means in your average 1m³ area thats about 5x5x5 = 125 bugs.

We'll assume these little sods have no more than, say, a flying height of 5 metres - correct me if I'm wrong here. And let's hope I am and it's less or you people in high rise flats will have to worry about them too.

According to the CIA the UK composes approximately 241,590 km² of land mass, of which 23.23% is arable land.

Now, I'll assume that these little sods are mostly confined to this otherwise I'm going to get nowhere. Plus this gives me something to assume and makes you city-folk feel better.

Where was I?

Right, anyway, this gives us 56,121.357 km² of land for these little pests to infest; which each km² having 125x1000² of them, ie. about 125 million.

Spanning this out across the UK this gives us around 7 billion bugs (A UK Billion - that is - that's twelve zeros kids)

Not forgetting, of course, our ceiling limit of 5 metres from earlier which gives us a grand total approximation of 35 billion (35,075,848,125,000) small flying annoying little sods and no doubt growing every year.

Now compare this to the UK population of 60,609,153 (July 2006 est.) this gives us 578,721 bugs per person in the UK.

Bloody hell, let's hope they don't get organised.

Comments

[whotheheckami.livejournal.com]

But how many can dance on a pinhead?

Perhaps if we can get them organised we can use them to make huge thrip/thunderbug 3-d animations across the countryside

[ev1ldonut.livejournal.com]

At my best I could never handle that many...

We need... [brief dramatic pause] The Man in Black!!!

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

But we don't know where he is!

[sogoth.livejournal.com]

He's buried in Hendersonville Momorial gardens in the US

[sogoth.livejournal.com]

um.. memorial even!

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

They're largely an East Anglia thing, I think - I know we used to get them everywhere when I lived in Norfolk, but I've not seen them in other places I've lived (Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, London...) - even when you do see them elsewhere, it's just the odd one or two that have got lost, rather than the infestation that seems to hit across the fens & fields.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

So we're the only ones infested? Curses!

[drpyrojames.livejournal.com]

Recalculation please.... :P

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Well if they reach 5,000 feet (1,524 metres) thats...

10,691,118,508,500,000 of them.

Or 1/10 of a trillian bugs! EEEEK!

[purpleheather.livejournal.com]

Thunderbugs?

I think you're right... I've lived in Surrey, London & Manchester, and I have no idea what Robin's going on about ;D

[drpyrojames.livejournal.com]

Don't worry I live five miles up the road from Robin and most of the time I have no idea what he is talking about either!

[mazzarc.livejournal.com]

And that's just one species of bug.... Humans are under this delusion that they "rule" and "own" this planet... stupid.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember worms are the most populous species on the planet.

[becky-spence.livejournal.com]

Um....

What's a thunderbug?

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

A small elipical black fly about 2 mm long.

[becky-spence.livejournal.com]

Ahhhhhh...

We have a few. They hang round house plants and generally annoy. Then they get squished...

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

That sounds more like blackfly or other aphid-y types, hanging around plants is far too sensible (and easily removed from).

Thunderflies are teeny, teeny things. They appear in this sort of humid hot weather (hence the name), and if I remember rightly, they waggle their bottoms in the same way that annoyed wasps do - only they look truly pathetic doing so, because they are barely the size of said wasp's leg/antennae. They then manage to get into the most ridiculous of places, like under the glass of picture frames, or as Robin complained, inside supposedly sealed units like flat screen monitors, and promptly die.

Thripps. That's one of the other names for them, that I was trying to remember.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I was going to write about thunderbugs last week, but then forgot to. They don't seem present in Southampton, but my arms were certainly covered in them when I was in Kent.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

As suspected then, may well be just a plague of the South East.

Hope we don't get frogs and blood rain next...

[briggsy.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I hate those things. I got a pile inside my LCD monitors last year which took ages to get out (there are still some in one I think, although they stopped walking around quite quickly - odd that, with a zonking great hot backlight just behind them). Never mind the small drifts of dead bugs on the window sills and anywhere else they get.

I'd never seen them before moving to Bar Hill, but I know why many houses have blinds instead of net curtains now ...

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

I need to get some blackout blinds again...

[scy11a.livejournal.com]

Hate to put your calcs awry, but I picked up several hundred on my nice clean shiny glider wings yesterday at altitudes up to 5,000ft : P
Really ruin my glider performance..... If they would only stay to the bottom 5metres

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

5,000ft? Oh dear.

Unless that's because they've been caught in the air thermals as well and tossed skyward (muhahaha)

[drpyrojames.livejournal.com]

Well normalise your 5 metres by the 5000 feet, rule out the non-southeast and you should have....


Still far too many of the fuckers. :)

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Damn right; they're in my other (good) monitor now.

Bastichs!