The Great Moth War

Whether you’re up against an insect invasion, a zombie apocalypse or the sudden appearance of a dwarf black hole in your kitchen sink, I’m always happy to share my rich experience in dealing with the insanity of daily life with my fellow paranoids, so here you go.

In the last couple of months, we have been fighting a guerilla force of small moths in our kitchen. They sit around on the walls and in cabinets, acting all innocent and harmless while their maggots dump their excrement in your food. Naturally, we wanted to get rid of them.
The hard part was not finding their nests. Search through your food storage for traces. The maggots leave behind a silky, almost invisible substance. Check the flour. If you can pull strings of flour out of the bag, you have guests. Examine the rice. If you keep your rice in a sealed plastic can, don’t feel too safe, because they still find a way in. They like cereal. They seem to ignore dried pasta somehow. Unopened stuff is fine, too. But if you’re easily grossed out, you can just throw everything away. You won’t help starving kids in Africa by keeping it. After your cabinets are empty, look out for cocooned maggots in the corners. These maggots, when you squash, them, they pop audibly.

Still, after throwing away a month’s worth of food, you will still find moths. Our moths annexed the box we keep hamster food in. I found one in the computer room. You have reached the hard part now, painstakingly exterminating all pockets of moth resistance.

The first step to victory is: Know your enemy.

Picture unrelated.

I checked wikipedia to find out about their weaknesses but I learned there's a bazillion different moth species and every single one of them seems to exist for one single reason: to shit all over your food while pointing their little fingers and laughing at you.

I had to identify the species first by examining one of them. Moths do not collect and bury their dead, so there was plenty of material to research on. After several hours of scientific internet studies (most of which consisted of Mothman movie reviews and web forums about conspiracy theories) I had a name to put to the face.

The European grain moth, also known as Nemapogon granella. Say it out loud.

This winged vigilante, this infernal creature of the night is the Ghengis Khan of the arthropod world. Besides having a name right out of a lovecraftian nightmare, it has also conquered most of Europe and somehow Australia. For various reasons (which I made up) it remains unseen in Iceland (too cold / full of fairies), Slovenia (no food to take a dump on) and - wait for it... France.
I’d like to think the reason for avoiding France is: It would be too easy to invade France. Even a moth has its goddamn code of honor.

Bienvenue, notres nouveaux insect overlords.

Alright, I was joking. It’s a popular cliché, but I know some French people, and they do not roll this way. They probably annihilated the grain moth years ago and didn’t bother to tell anyone because it’s nobody else’s business. I’m serious about the fairies, though.

But I digress. I had to think of a strategy. The first battle plan, “Operation Scorched Earth” or “setting the kitchen on fire” was not met with much enthusiasm from my girlfriend. Instead she proposed small, quick, surgical advances into occupied territory and generally just killing the fuckers on sight. Still, this approach turned out to be quite messy.

These six-legged lap dogs of Satan, you see, are tough as nails and very fragile at the same time. Try to squash them on an easy to clean surface like floor tiles and they will just shrug it off and fly away while you clutch your sprained knuckles and sob. On the other hand, when they sit on a white wall, you only have to do so much as look at them hard enough and they will explode in a cloud of moth intestines and malicious glee, leaving a behind a brown smear that will be there as a reminder of your cruelty for fucking ever.

Men, prepare for tactical explosion -
and don't forget to crap on the rice crispies.

I had to learn to catch them in flight. I spend weeks training how to predict their crazy flight patterns, wait for the right moment, and strike. I had no Mr. Miyagi to help me. I got pretty good at it, though. And then one day I came home from work, prepared for another epic night of slaying moths from dusk ‘til dawn, and I couldn’t find any. They were gone.

By the time I'm writing this, they’re still gone. We join Iceland, Slovenia and France on the list of moth-free areas in Europe.
Either they have left for good or they have abandoned their hit-and-run guerilla tactics, building up their army for a full scale war.