Thinker

Are two weapons always better than one?

People lift weights at the gym but would hate having to unexpectedly carry something heavy without knowing when they can put it down.

Because, you see, the humble tobacco beetle is nigh invincible as an egg. They’re tinier than a pin head, and the egg can undergo desiccation that halts all life, sorta like a water bear. They can survive like this for up to two years.

Once there’s enough humidity and heat, though, they hatch into little larva that are also pretty tough despite the squishy appearance.

The beetles are TINY. They’re about 1/8 of an inch long and are related to flea beetles.

They don’t exclusively live in tobacco, but they are almost impossible to poison because they have a super liver and a gland behind their head where they can store and excrete toxins. Hence cigarette companies got creative because these things, being immune to nicotine, tend to monopolise tobacco stores and replicate out of control. But they’re like an ever adapting super bug, quite literally, because they aren’t killed by formalin now either, and the more companies try to protect their stock with trace toxins the more resistant these suckers become. Genetic engineering to retain more potency in dry leaves has yielded some results, but it’s only a matter of time before they once again adapt to the new aversions.

These are kinda like the cockroaches of beetles, as a genus (Lasioderma); they’re not killed by much, and they can eat just about anything organic, though they prefer fungi and dead leaf matter. They’re not pests, really, to living plants, they just have a market edge eating the remnants that are still too toxic for anything else. Millipedes are the only other invertebrates I know that do this on such a scale; they’re super-composters, eating what other detritivores can not.

Unfortunately that makes them something of a bane on tobacco and tea lovers. (They also infest tea stores, and coffee sometimes, especially decaf if it’s stale enough, because they’re pretty immune to caffeine — though coffee has its own beetle pest.)

Wikipedia: “Lasioderma serricorne, more commonly referred to as the cigarette beetle, cigar beetle, or tobacco beetle, is a small beetle that shares a resemblance with the drugstore beetle (Stegobium paniceum) and the common furniture beetle(Anobium punctatum)”