Don't Buy Thousands of Live Insects Online You Drunk Idiot

For $383.60 plus shipping and handling, you can have 72,000 live ladybugs delivered to your door from a company called Bug Sales. That's apparently exactly what a handful of seniors in Maryland did last week as a senior prank.

According to various news reports, five seniors and a former student broke into their school at 3 AM and dumped the ladybugs all over the place. The bugs allegedly broke the school's air conditioning and caused other various sorts of havoc.

Bug Sales isn't the only company that deals in bugs and other various crawling things, but it's one of the larger ones: You can buy 2,500 lacewing eggs, "25 million beneficial nematodes," some "predatory mites," and 5,000 fly predators. Other companies sell live ants, cockroaches, crickets, worms, and so on. Ostensibly, the insects are for pest management, feeding your lizard or snake, or fishing bait. They also make for good (as in, disruptive, annoying) pranks.

Do not use insects as a prank. Many bugs sold online are wild-harvested, according to Suzanne Wainwright, an entomologist and consultant for organic farmers. Though ladybugs are found basically everywhere in North America, they carry different diseases and parasites depending on where they're from. That means a ladybug caught in California can infect local ones in, say, Maryland.

Bug Sales does not say whether its ladybugs are wild caught or farmed, but notes that its ladybugs are "great for kids, birthday parties, and school projects," though I don't know why you would need 9,000 of them for a school project unless that school project is to cause a bunch of havoc. It's worth noting that someone on Amazon posted in March that he or she was "going to buy these and drop them on my classroom the last day of school."

There are various restrictions on mailing live animals, but you can pretty much mail any live insects, as long as you can prevent the bugs from damaging the shipping container, protect the public from "dangerous or diseased animals" and "obnoxious odors and noise," and can generally keep the animals alive. The postal service says live birds; live, warm-blooded animals; reptiles; and poisonous insects and spiders are illegal to mail, in case you were wondering.

ANYWAYS, this is a slightly long way of saying that, toward the end of last year, some dude sent a whole bunch of live, biting ants to me. We ran a very short series of videos called "I Will Open Anything," a satirical take on breathless unboxing videos.

We asked the internet to mail us things, and we would open them, on camera. We got one box.

I suppose that "ants" falls into the purview of "anything," but I wasn't really expecting to end up with a bunch of red ants that came with a warning sign that said they would likely bite me if I let them out.

At first, it was kind of funny. And then, I was stuck with hundreds of ants. I didn't know where the ants came from, I didn't know what to do with them, I didn't know what species they were. I didn't want to release them in a park and have them be some sort of invasive species. By the time I even opened the thing, most of the ants were dead, and eating and crawling all over each other.

I am not the only person who has dealt with such a scenario. Take this guy on Craigslist, who bought 1,500 ladybugs while he was drunk.

"After consuming pot brownies and getting a little too drunk on Thanksgiving a friend and I decided to buy 1,500 live ladybugs from amazon, which was a great idea until they came in the mail. Now they're sitting on my windowsill and I have nothing to really do with them. If I set them free they'll die in this weather, if I leave them on my windowsill they'll die," he wrote. "I don't want to ruin 1,500 lives."

Receiving a bunch of live insects in the mail is a pain. By the time I had even thought about what to do with them, they were all dead. And yes, they were "just" ants. But I had to deal with them all of a sudden, and that's what a school in Maryland is dealing with right now.

If you introduce a bunch of unsolicited insects to an office, or to a school, or to some other place, you are pretty much sentencing them to die. You can buy bugs online, but unless you have a good reason to, I wouldn't recommend it.