Where have all the love bugs gone?

I'm gonna say it was aliens

 

Saw a couple yesterday and just figured here they come.
I guess their arrival is late, delayed or not happening.
I’m cool with that. But hope it’s not foreboding for other important food chain animals.

 

They followed Paula Cole's Cowboys

 

Mortality on Florida’s highways took care of a lot of them.

Love bugs are non-native and flourished for a long while once introduced but it may be that a native predator or pathology has begun to exploit them significantly- a wag on my part.

 

Covid.

 

There was an urban legend for years that the love bugs were the result of a UF mosquito control experiment that went bad.

Edit: Speaking of experiments gone bad, I've been BLUKED!

 

They’ve become incels.

 

Could be that they had no immunity to the naturally occurring invertebrate sexually transmitted diseases and given their normal steady state of flying united, bug VD devastated the population.

 

Little Chinese mini drones spying on us since the early 1960's.

 

This thread a dupe from the Pub?
Anyway, I took out a bunch on my way from Tallacrappy last weekend.

 

Yes! The Pub scooped Too Hot on Love Bugs.
https://www.gatorcountry.com/swampg...ow-but-they’ve-vanished.607099/#post-16434785

My post from the Pub's thread ~
Years back a persistent off the wall rumor circulated among certain groups of people blaming the University for irresponsibly creating them in a genetics lab on campus. It was debunked numerous times of course, yet persisted. I had only read of the rumor until I actually heard some ignorant Florida woman repeat it to an out of state tourist who was dismayed at the massive swarms on a nature trail at the Alachua Sink in Payne's Prairie Park about 20 years ago.

I could not keep silent but my interjection of sanity likely did not dispel the ignorant woman's conviction she was right and I was wrong.

The Lovebug: Escaped Lab Experiment or Nature’s Harmless Decomposer? | Entomology and Nematology Online| University of Florida
The Lovebug: Escaped Lab Experiment or Nature’s Harmless Decomposer?
Recognizable by their red thorax, lovebugs (Plecia nearcitca and Plecia americana Hardy) are known for their propensity for getting “stuck together” and splattering en masse into car windshields. You may have also heard a rumor that they are an experiment-gone-wrong created by the University of Florida. UF may be home to the number-one ranked entomology and nematology program in the world according to the Center for World University Rankings, but we can’t take credit for the lovebug.

The lovebug’s origin isn’t the only misconception about these tiny insects. For starters, lovebugs aren’t actually bugs: they’re flies, more closely related to mosquitoes and gnats. There are, in fact, so many misconceptions about lovebugs that we thought we’d dispel some of the more outlandish claims. If you love learning about fascinating and surprisingly controversial creatures like the lovebug, enroll in one of UF’s online entomology and nematology programs.

Did the University of Florida Create the Lovebug?
Is there a secret laboratory deep within the confines of UF’s campus where the world’s top scientists are banding together to create flying monstrosities the likes of which the world has never known? We’re sorry to disappoint you, but the idea that lovebugs were created by UF to control mosquitos is sadly nothing more than an urban legend. That doesn’t mean mankind isn’t waging a war against mosquitoes. Check out Florida’s plan to release 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes into the Florida Keys.

As eloquently summed up by the Crowley Museum & Nature Center, “If science had advanced to a level of being able to completely create an organism that successfully feeds and reproduces, do you really think it would be a lovebug?” UF did not create the lovebug (but you can be sure that it would be blue and orange if we had).
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The central America bugs entered the US in Texas after WW2 and made their way across the southeast into Florida. I first remember seeing them in the mid to late 50's when I was in elementary school.

 

Maybe they've become anti-natalist? Who would seriously want to bring more lovebugs into the world tonly to suffer and die by windshield?

 

seen a few in SW Florida this year. Maybe all the traffic has an upside??

have to wonder if aerial mosquito spraying has been a factor

 

Maybe they used some special love bug magic to put everyone to sleep for 3 days without noticing so they could really do some LIVIN