"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris," says HemingwayErnest Hemingway was an American novelist. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. , "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

Ah, Paris! Never a shortage of things to fill your days. Romantic walks along the Seine, gawking at art in the LouvreA famous art museum in Paris, France. , getting lost in the dark and gothic catacombsAn underground cemetery, with passages and rooms where bodies were buried in the past. . When it gets dark, a vibrant nightlife, the Eiffel Tower lit up in resplendent, sparkling gold, and hundreds of tiny parasitesWhen a creature lives on or inside another creature, causing it harm. crawling out of your mattress ready to make you into their moveable feast.

It hardly lives up to the romantic ideal. But nowadays, travellers seeking out the winding streets of the city of love or the extravagant high fashion season are more likely to come head-to-head with the city's infestation of ravenousVery hungry. bedbugs.

Nor have they had the common decency to stick to beds. Parisians have been circulating horror stories of bedbug infestations in cinemas, the metro and even restaurants. Nobody is safe. They are almost impossible to get rid of, and their uncomfortable bites can plague you for months on end.

Infestations can take a while to take hold, but are persistent. A study conducted between 2017 and 2022 found that 11% of French households had been infested by the bugs, and numbers continue to rise. Some have raised concerns about the 2024 Olympics, which are set to be held in Paris less than a year from now.

Bed bugs were rampantSpreading quickly. during World War Two in western Europe, largely because of poor hygiene. But after a brief lull, they have experienced a resurgenceA revival after a period of inactivity. in recent years, supposedly due to densely populated urban areas, global travel and increasing resistance to pesticides. Some think that we will soon see the worst infestation in human history.

We can see from fossils in Egypt that bedbugs have been plaguing humans for at least 3,500 years. On their own, they cannot travel far. But as they hide in human clothes and bedding, we have unwittingly taken them all around the world on our backs.

To add insult to injury, many scientists believe that bedbugs add precisely nothing to the ecosystem. They do not pollinateTaking pollen from one plant to another so new seeds can be produced. - the single most important process in our food chain - and, though they are consumed by spiders, they are only one of the many plentiful insects devoured by the arachnidsA group of insects including spiders. .

For many, these bugs encompass meaningless life. All they do is create nuisance. One of the top searches they attract on Google is "why did God create bedbugs?"

We might see the bugs as a mere swarm of near-particles that do not impact the world. But some ask: is it pretentiousTrying to sound more important or clever than you are. to assume that we are any more? There are at least a million billion galaxies which each contain hundreds of billions of stars. There are zillions of planets which may have evolved forms of life. In the grand scheme of things, we are no bigger than those tiny bugs.

And in fact, the architecture of a bedbug is quite remarkable. They have incredible sensory capabilities which allow them to detect their prey even in pitch black darkness. They can survive great extremes of weather, from deserts to polar latitudesSpecies are moving polewards, closer to the north and south poles.. They are nocturnal and shed their exoskeletonA skeleton on the outside of the body. after a blood meal. They can go for 70 days without food.

Intriguingly, scientists increasingly think that bedbugs could in future serve a useful purpose. Human DNA can persist in the parasites for up to 90 days after feeding, meaning that forensic investigators could potentially use them in criminal investigations.

Yes: Even the humble bedbug, which at first seems to have little use, can be made to have some kind of function - in this case, in forensic investigations. This goes to show that anything can have a purpose.

No: The bedbug is nothing more than a common pest, and furthermore one that could send the world and maybe even the world economy into turmoil if it disrupts the Olympics next year. Meanwhile, it adds nothing to our ecosystem.

Or... The bedbug may not have much purpose - but then neither do we. On a philosophical level, it might be argued that we are just as tiny and insignificant as them - we just have a lot of lofty pretensions about ourselves.