Friday, December 10, 2004
Annals of entomology: The pantry infestation
Last night, we reported on the sorry state of our pantry and certain "archived" cooking materials of a certain age found therein. We were cleaning the pantry because of an infestation of some sort of insect, but since the family expert is not locally available we backseated the interests of science to the destruction of the infestation. In our own little Operation Phantom Fury, we destroyed the infestation via the liberal application of insecticide.
Mission Accomplished, the question remained: Whence the vector? Mrs. TigerHawk, feeling "a bit defensive since I did not realize last evening that as part of showing the 18-year-old corn starch that you would be sharing our bug problem with the world," hunted high and low and eventually reported "that the vector has been identified, and it's not a product I bought" [implying quite obviously that she thinks I bought the product, which unfortunately I did - ed.]. Indeed, it appears that the insects in question emerged from this Health Valley "low fat vegetarian chile" container, which has not been opened by any mammal.
Those round dots you see are holes from which it appears insects emerged to invade the rest of the pantry. A close-up for the skeptical:
There are dozens of these holes around the edge of the package and through the bottom, and we found heaps of the little six-legged varmints around the package. While there is some small chance, I suppose, that the insects came from elsewhere and concentrated around the Health Valley low fat vegetarian chile, that strikes us as unlikely. There were many unauthorized critters ("angels straight from heaven," as the TigerHawk sister would say) in other opened packages of crackers, rice, cereal, pancake mix and so on, but there were no other unopened packages with these tell-tale apertures, which suggests strongly that they are not points of ingress.
Of course, there will be those who argue that I deserve what happens to me for buying anything that describes itself as "low fat vegetarian chile," since nobody in their right mind would eat chile preceded by either "low fat" or "vegetarian." I trust I will hear from those people in the comments section.
Mission Accomplished, the question remained: Whence the vector? Mrs. TigerHawk, feeling "a bit defensive since I did not realize last evening that as part of showing the 18-year-old corn starch that you would be sharing our bug problem with the world," hunted high and low and eventually reported "that the vector has been identified, and it's not a product I bought" [implying quite obviously that she thinks I bought the product, which unfortunately I did - ed.]. Indeed, it appears that the insects in question emerged from this Health Valley "low fat vegetarian chile" container, which has not been opened by any mammal.
Those round dots you see are holes from which it appears insects emerged to invade the rest of the pantry. A close-up for the skeptical:
There are dozens of these holes around the edge of the package and through the bottom, and we found heaps of the little six-legged varmints around the package. While there is some small chance, I suppose, that the insects came from elsewhere and concentrated around the Health Valley low fat vegetarian chile, that strikes us as unlikely. There were many unauthorized critters ("angels straight from heaven," as the TigerHawk sister would say) in other opened packages of crackers, rice, cereal, pancake mix and so on, but there were no other unopened packages with these tell-tale apertures, which suggests strongly that they are not points of ingress.
Of course, there will be those who argue that I deserve what happens to me for buying anything that describes itself as "low fat vegetarian chile," since nobody in their right mind would eat chile preceded by either "low fat" or "vegetarian." I trust I will hear from those people in the comments section.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Dec 11, 05:58:00 AM:
How often does one literally LOL at a blogpost? You really must get M. Laurie Henneman on the case, but in the meantime, you have given us the world in a grain of sand -- or, in this case, a holey can of Health Valley low-fat vegetarian chile. While I emmpathize with Mrs. Tigerhawk's possible invasion of privacy, her loss is the blogosphere's gain.
By , at
Sat Dec 11, 06:00:00 AM:
Forgot to add: "Trouble in Paradise," the title of the Science article about your sis's work, would have been the perfect title for your own blogpost.
