PAGES : And What’s Bugging You?

Talk about up close and personal.

“Furtive Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live on You” (Penguin) regales us with tales of bedbugs, lice, itch mites and other parasites that inhabit human bodies.

Everybody’s an unwitting a host to such critters, maintains author Roger M. Knutson, the Iowa biology professor who wrote the bestseller “Flattened Fauna.” Though that book was jokingly described by its publisher as a look at “animals who lost their third dimension,” it is a serious work on wildlife living near streets and highways.

Knutson’s new book on parasites also contains actual scientific information presented in a lighthearted fashion. We learn, for instance, that bacteria are so small that “an uppercase O about the size of a bedbug could hold numbers of bacteria equal to the population of Omaha, Neb.”

Parasites can be both friendly and unfriendly. Charitable tooth amoebas can help prevent cavities. Irritating chiggers, “the juvenile delinquents of the ectoparasite world,” can produce itchy, red spots.

“You probably believe (parasites) are not there. Trust me, they are,” Knutson warns readers. “Each of us is a whole ecological landscape for these tiny ones, with every pore both a potential hiding place and a potential death trap . . . These parasites are not like your in-laws; they are smaller and easier to maintain.”