Every May and September these suicidal sex-crazed critters become an annoyance making messes of themselves on vehicles and constantly being swatted away. They seemed to have popped up out of thin air and we've seen an abundance of "mad scientist" stories about how the state of florida came to be infested with them. (Love bugs are not solely a Floridian plague. they range throughout the Gulf states and into Mexico and Central America, as well as up into Georgia and South Carolina. But they seem particularly enamored of Florida.)
Legends say, Decades ago, with the mosquito population out of control, the University of Florida's mad scientists decided to fight back. Scientists were genetically engineering females of a species of insect that would mate with the male mosquito, but be sterile and produce no offspring. Unfortunately, they accidentally also created a male Love Bug, and a pair somehow escaped into the wild. Since the bugs had no natural predators, their numbers quickly exploded into the millions.
Fortunately, Love bugs are not the result of a genetic cloning experiment gone wrong, nor did they escape from a research facility. They also weren't bio-engineered as a natural solution to the mosquito problem, as love bugs do not eat mosquitoes.
In the end the facts are simply that Mother Nature allowed some of her children to migrate to a new area, and in doing so it prompted the creation of a number of rumors in attempt to explain why these pesky bugs came to take residence in places where they weren't found before.
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