What If Pests Could Be Secret Santas?

What If Pests Could Be Secret Santas?

The holiday season is officially upon us, and one of the most popular gift-giving traditions this time of year is the classic Secret Santa exchange. This practice is when each participant blindly picks the name of another participant and has to give them a gift that they think the recipient will enjoy. The big reveal is done differently depending on the rules of the group, but the most common ways are either guessing who gave you the unnamed gift immediately or having the Secret Santa reveal their status as they hand the recipient their gift. Secret Santa is often done in larger groups to add to the mystery, so it’s common to see this tradition being done in college dorms, extended families, and tight-knit offices. 

This lighthearted tradition is certainly fun for us to participate in, but this leads us to wonder: what if common pests could also be Secret Santas? In this fictional scenario, they would likely put just as much thought into their gifts as we do. Let’s explore some of the possibilities of a pest-to-pest gift exchange and see how the habits and features of real pests would influence their gift giving skills in this fun fictional scenario.

Cricket to Grasshopper — Headphones

Crickets and grasshoppers already look pretty similar to one another, so it’s understandable why their unique hearing abilities are often confused for each other’s. Grasshoppers have a simple eardrum (a tympana) under their wings on the side of their abdomen. This eardrum vibrates when there is noise nearby, but it cannot recognize pitch or other complexities of a sound. The hearing organs of a cricket are behind its “knees” on the front legs, and these seem to be more developed than a grasshopper’s tympana. Crickets can determine which direction a sound is coming from and tell the difference between their species’ various chirps. 

Since both of these insects create songs as their communication — through a process called stridulation — the cricket would happily give the grasshopper a set of new headphones as their Secret Santa. Both pests would constantly listen to music if they had the opportunity, so this would be the perfect gift. However, the cricket would probably make an unfortunate oversight. They would get a grasshopper the headphones made for a cricket’s lower hearing organs, so they wouldn’t work with the grasshopper’s tympana (though the grasshopper would be too polite to say anything)!

Spider to Carpenter Bee — Homemade Wall Art

Everyone has their own preferences for home decor. Some prefer to keep it extremely minimal with a few statement pieces, others cover every surface with some type of decor, and still others like to display their most sentimental items throughout the home. How we decorate our homes is a matter of personal taste, which can make it quite difficult to gift someone a piece of decor if you don’t know their style or likes very well. Two pests that know all about art and home decor are the spider and carpenter bee. Spiders intricately weave their mesmerizing webs by producing silk from their spinnerets and slowly creating a pattern that will both catch their prey and hold their egg sacs. Conversely, female carpenter bees chew holes into natural wood and carve out tunnels for their eventual offspring to inhabit. They place a piece of bee bread (a pollen and nectar mixture) and one of their eggs in each natural cell that they create within the tunnels, so carpenter bees have plenty of “rooms” to decorate if they had the opportunity. 

The spider would thoughtfully create a wall hanging out of their own webs, weaving together a floral pattern that they think the bee will like. It would be similar to macrame art, but spider silk is much finer than macrame cord. After the spider nervously gives their art to the carpenter bee, the buzzing insect would immediately express just how much they love this gift and truly appreciate it. Once they get home from the festivities, the carpenter bee would immediately hang their new art piece in the first cell so that they can see it every time they enter their hidden home.

Mouse to Tick — Houseplant

Mice and ticks are some of the most despicable pests around, but for entirely different reasons. Rodents are disease-ridden scavengers who accumulate bacteria from searching for food in garbage dumps and sewers, then transmit it to our homes by walking all over everything. On the other hand, ticks only pose a danger to humans and pets that unknowingly pick them up outdoors. Ticks wait in thick brush and grass for a mammal to pass by, then use their sticky legs to attach to their new host and crawl to a hidden place with exposed skin to make their feeding easier. As the tick continuously feeds on their host, it will become engorged with the blood and need to go somewhere else to digest a few days later. Unfortunately, many ticks are infected with a blood borne disease that they can transmit to each host, with Lyme disease being the most common.

We don’t want these pests anywhere near us in real life, but in this fictional world where they can exchange gifts, mice and ticks are much more appealing. The mouse would immediately spill the beans on their identity as the tick’s Secret Santa simply because the mouse is too excited to contain itself. But the tick wouldn’t mind because the mouse would then hand it the gift, which would be a beautiful houseplant. The mouse found this plant — likely a spider plant or snake plant — by rifling through the garden section at its local hardware store and putting its scavenging skills to work since it knew that the tick would love a good houseplant. The tick would express its gratitude of both the actual plant and the amount of time that the mouse spent finding it. Then the tick would take the houseplant home and immediately crawl into the green leaves to hide, purely out of habit.

Mosquito to Fruit Fly — Mixed Drinks Cookbook

If you can’t decide on a Secret Santa gift, a White Elephant gift, or a basic gift for anyone, a cookbook is always a good idea because there are so many different sub-genres and topics on the market today. It’s an easy way to personalize the gift to fit the taste (literally) and preferences of the recipient, which is what we believe the mosquito would want to do for the fruit fly. In real life, mosquitoes are not super picky with the mammals they choose to bite. They find their warm-blooded hosts by detecting body heat, sweat, and carbon dioxide output. Fruit flies don’t have a bloodthirsty tendency, but they are still an absolute nuisance to have in the home. They feed primarily on overripe fruit and fermented sugar. Fruit flies have strong mouthparts that can pierce the softened fruit, then drink the juice and lay their eggs on the surface. 

Fruit flies favor rotten fruit and leftover alcoholic drinks, but after the mosquito gifts them with the perfect Secret Santa gift, they would have many more drink options to choose from. The mosquito would find the perfect cookbook during one of their evening scrolls through social media, then happily gift the fruit fly Beverages For Every Occasion. The fruit fly would be ecstatic to receive this book since they never would’ve splurged on it for itself. While the mosquito is probably thinking about the multiple Bloody Mary recipes in the book, the fruit fly would likely set its sights on a different section. For the next two weeks, the fruit fly would make every single smoothie recipe in the cookbook, adding way too much fruit to the blender for it to properly mix everything together. 

Drain Fly to Stink Bug — Multipack of Candles

Two pests with some of the most straightforward yet gross names are definitely the stink bug and drain fly. Drain flies are exactly what they sound like: flies that live in and near drains. They look like fuzzy moths, but drain flies are much smaller than standard moths. These flies need to live in drains or plumbing equipment of some kind, as both the adults and the young need the moisture to survive. They feed on decay that can be found in fungi, algae, bacteria, and sewage. Conversely, stink bugs function more like garden pests because they have sharp mouthparts with which to pierce plants and fruit before drinking the sap. Their name stems from their defensive technique of spraying a smelly chemical from an abdominal gland. The odor has been compared to cilantro or other strong herbs, so you will definitely know if you have stink bugs in your home.

This gift could honestly be from either pest, but we think it would be more likely for the drain fly to gift a 3-pack of scented candles to the stink bug. The designated scents would probably be something like Fruit Salad, Fresh Laundry, and Cotton Candy. While it is a nice gift for most people to give or receive, these candles would be for a purpose. The drain fly would play it off like they just wanted to give the stink bug a pleasing gift (“I thought you would like these scents!”), but really, the drain fly just wants to help the stink bug’s home smell a bit better than usual. The stink bug wouldn’t mind the motivation behind the gift and would just be excited for these delightful smells, which will definitely achieve exactly what the drain fly intended. That being said, we hope the drain fly would buy itself a scented candle or two as well, since their own habitat is a far cry from a clean and good-smelling home. 

Give Yourself The Gift Of Pest Control With Pointe!

All of these fictional gift options are great for a real-life Secret Santa exchange, but do you know what is the best gift of all? A pest-free home! Although pest control services are commonly regarded as a summertime necessity, they are actually important to have all year long. At Pointe Pest Control, our regularly-scheduled services operate on a quarterly basis in order to keep our wonderful clients pest-free throughout every season. Between our thorough inspections and targeted treatments, we guarantee that we will solve your pest problems as efficiently as possible. Our experienced technicians are completely trained in the safest and most effective methods to eliminate dozens of pest species, and we will leave no pest untreated when we’re on the scene. We consistently eliminate current pests and prevent future ones so you can live pest-free for the entire year. Contact us today for a free quote on our reliable pest control services that are the gift that keeps giving!

Citations

Carpenter bees. (n.d.). Pointe Pest Control. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://pointepestcontrol.com/services/carpenter-bees/

Field cricket. (n.d.). Great Plains Nature Center. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://gpnc.org/fauna/insects/field-cricket/ 

Fruit flies & food. (n.d.). Orkin. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://www.orkin.com/pests/flies/fruit-flies/fruit-flies-and-food

Hadley, D. (n.d.). 10 fascinating facts about grasshoppers. Magnuson Children’s Garden. Available at https://magnusonchildrensgarden.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/10-Fascinating-Facts-About-Grasshoppers.pdf (Accessed on November 28, 2023).

Moth flies or drain flies. (n.d.). Michigan State University: Plant & Pest Diagnostics. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://www.canr.msu.edu/resources/moth-flies-or-drain-flies

Rodents. (n.d.). Pointe Pest Control. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://pointepestcontrol.com/services/rodents/

Stink bugs. (n.d.). Pointe Pest Control. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://pointepestcontrol.com/services/stink-bugs/

Ticks. (n.d.). Pointe Pest Control. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://pointepestcontrol.com/services/ticks/