14 DAY TRIAL // Ladies, it may be worthwhile to have a hairy man by your side after all. A new study shows that men with more bodily hair are better at detecting bedbugs crawling on the conjugal bed than those who groom themselves excessively.
This was detected in controlled laboratory settings, where scientists put men with both hairy and shaved arms to the test by placing bedbugs on their hands. According to the team that conducted the research, those with hairy arms were at least a few seconds quicker at detecting the intruders.
The thing about bedbugs is that they are microscopic. Their size is one of their greatest advantages, but also one of their greatest weaknesses. On one hand, they can move about unseen, even in daylight, but on the other, they can get squashed with no effort.
The parasites are in the habit of nesting near or on beds and couches, which they use as basis of operations for night raids on their unsuspecting human victims. However, in order to pierce our skin and drink our blood, they first have to navigate to the surface of the skin.
This comes extremely easy if the arm is shaved, or is naturally less prone to developing hair strands. In the case of hairy men, there are fewer chances of a bedbug navigating to the surface of the skin undetected, primarily because it is bound to disturb at least a hair.
Each strand has its own motion receptor in the skin, so the chances of the invader being detected are significantly higher if they attack a hairy man than a less-hairy one. The investigation that arrived at this conclusion used a batch of 19 volunteers, ScienceNow reports.
Each of the participants had a different amount of body hair. Scientists then shaved the hair off one arm of each test subjects, and asked them to look away while bedbugs were dropped on their hand. The subjects were then asked to hit a button as soon as they felt something crawling on their arms.
Sure enough, those with more hair follicles per square inch, and those with longer body hair, were several seconds quicker to the punch than their peers. The study is detailed in the December 13 online issue of the esteemed journal Biology Letters.
The research is also interesting because it provides a new insight into why we still have hair. Our species evolved out of its fur coat because we learned to keep warm by artificial means, but body hair may have remained still because we need it to protect ourselves against crawling insects.