Louis N. Sorkin toted a large black duffel bag on his weekday commute by train from Westchester to his entomologist”™s job in Manhattan. In the duffel was a smaller green cloth bag. It bore specimens much in the news these days and much a part of the consulting business Sorkin runs from his Rye Brook home.
At an Upper West Side coffee shop, he opened both bags and lifted out a plastic food storage sack. It was filled with aerated vials that crawled with bugs in various life stages measured in blood meals and millimeters. “Cimex lectularius,” said Sorkin, giving the bugs”™ scientific name. Bedbugs.
They bite the hand that feeds them ”“ Sorkin”™s. Tiny red marks on the back of his hand ”“ the bugs”™ controlled-feeding venue and meal ”“ were telltale evidence of the previous night”™s dining-out. Sorkin uses an artist”™s paint brush to move the nymphs and adults from vial to hand, where they “plump up” on their willing host”™s blood in groups of 10.
Of more than 90 species of bedbug on the planet, “It”™s one or two that are a big problem” for humans, Sorkin said. “The one species that we have a problem with, that”™s a generalist. Dogs, cats, birds, rodents, it can be any host” on which it feeds. When an apartment-dwelling human host goes on vacation, the generalist will crawl ”“ it has only vestigial wings and does not fly ”“ to an occupied apartment for its meals.
Sorkin a go-to guy for bug identification
“It”™s affected major businesses everywhere, not just in this area,” Sorkin said of the much-publicized bedbug epidemic that has temporarily closed major retailers and movie theaters in Manhattan this summer. “But it”™s more of a problem in multiple-family dwellings.”
In infested metropolitan New York, Sorkin has been a go-to guy on the subject of bedbugs, interviewed on television network news shows and in demand as an educational presenter to physicians at area hospitals and school groups of parents and teachers, among others. The American Museum of Natural History, where since 1978 he has worked on spider and other arachnid collections, often refers questions on bedbugs and bedbug infestations to Sorkin.
Sorkin”™s entomological consulting business, Entsult Associates Inc., is independent of his museum work. He started it in the early 1980s. “Businesses would call who knew me,” said Sorkin, one of the few forensic entomologists who work with police agencies and law firms in the tristate area. “About 10 years ago, it seemed like a good thing to incorporate the business.” Much of his bug detection work involves infested stored products, especially wood materials and foods. His clients include insurance surveyors, import-export firms and shipping companies. He has tracked insects in retail stores and in kitchens and pantries at large investment firms in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Pest control companies and building managers regularly call him in to apartment and office buildings to authoritatively identify bedbugs and other pests. In New York City, he works with a few condo and co-op boards on bedbug remediation. “Even museums in the area have called in” seeking help with bug problems, he said.
Sorkin brings to office buildings a low-tech tool ”“ a lint roller. He collects dust samples from sills and surfaces to examine for insects and mites “or parts thereof on them. It helps to identify what”™s going on in the office environment,” he said.
Customers buy bugs from Sorkin
Some of his clients demand thriving bedbugs. Sorkin ships them, contained in vials or “hides” like those in his bag, to trainers of bedbug-detecting dogs, dog handlers in the pest control business and to scientific institutes in the U.S. and Canada. Some larger companies and dog-training businesses order 100 to 150 bugs at a time, he said.
“I try to do it wholesale rather than individual” sales, the bedbug dealer said. Customers pay $3 per pest, a market price Sorkin said he adopted from other dealers. “There”™s a few suppliers out there,” he said.
In his consulting business, Sorkin has taught forensic entomology to New York City homicide police. He has been called to crime scenes and has analyzed bugs collected at crime scenes and sent to him by investigators.
An entomologist can estimate a victim”™s time of death by the stages of insect life on the corpse, he said. “You might have insects arriving; you might have insects depositing eggs,” he said. Insects also might be found that come from another location, possibly indicating the victim had been moved.
The dreaded bedbug can serve a useful civic purpose in police work. Forensic analysis of the blood in a bedbug collected at a crime scene can be compared with that of suspects.
“You”™re using the bedbug actually as a syringe,” said Sorkin. “You assay the bedbug to see who they were feeding on.”
Education can stop spread of bedbugs
Sorkin said bedbug infestations “just snowballed in geometric proportions in the last five to 10 years.” The problem will not abate until persons are better educated on how to identify the insect and its telltale signs, such as shed skins and droppings, and how to prevent their spread. The entomologist said he plans to organize classes for dog handlers, pest control workers and real estate managers “to teach all these people about bedbugs.”
“When bedbug numbers were real low, which would have been in the 1950s and the late ”™80s, there were still pockets of infestation in our country,” he said. The ease and low cost of travel enabled the bugs, which hitchhike on human bodies, to spread. “There was no awareness and no early warning that it was going on,” he said.
