The slaphappy season: Gnats & their flesh-gnawing kin - ouch! - bring it on

One woman admitted to slapping herself in the face, twice, and laughed about it. Just this week, a group of soccer moms in South Jersey held conversations with their shirts pulled over their eyes. Joggers stopped in full stride to rub their eyes, and fishermen quit, with no fish.

Are these people having episodes? Has the apocalypse finally arrived, a month later?

Based on a . . . ahem . . . scientific survey of Twitter and Facebook, observations among Daily News staffers, and this reporter's personal experience, it appears that massive mobs of gnats are wreaking havoc on the Delaware Valley. They're either sucking your blood - the ones that can, anyway - or orbiting your head like the little biplanes that sent King Kong into such a rage.

Naturally, we contacted several esteemed experts at schools like Penn State and Rutgers to comment on our investigative findings. Many of them wanted samples of the pests, though, as if we had been roaming the countryside with jars and nets.

And they scoffed at our broad generalizations of "gnats." I had lunch, I told them, with a friend who said the insects were hovering near his pool in Center City recently, but the academics wanted more.

"I refuse to be quoted," one told me.

Another annoyed academic finally said the culprits might not technically be gnats, but could be "black flies," which he said have been "prolific" in the Delaware River system this year. Diana Carle, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, said Pennsylvania has the largest program in the world to control black flies to deal with the legions that emerge from its rivers each spring.

"It's certainly huge," she said of the evil swarms.

So what caused this bloodsucking horde to overpopulate Pennsylvania? Was it global warming? Corrupt politicians? Industrial runoff? It turns out that toxic waste once caused black flies to flee because their larvae filter food through the water.

Once the nation began cleaning up its rivers, the insects returned in swarms.

"They are fairly pollution intolerant," Carle said.

Jon Gelhaus, a curator in the entomology department at the Academy of Natural Sciences, said there are also little gnatlike insects along the coast, commonly referred to as no-see-ums or punkies, that bite, giving off a slight pinprick/burning sensation. They look like little flecks of pepper and Gelhaus and I both agree they'd both be great names for bands.

"I'm sure there's already a band named after them," he said. (There's already an obscure band from Niagara Falls, Canada, called The Black Flies.)

If you think black flies or punkies are hovering all around you - up your nose, in your ears, down your throat - Gelhaus said it's simply that time of year, when the weather or precipitation causes these things to hatch. Basically, it's a plague, though he didn't use those exact words.

"This could all be normal," he said. "There's always a whole lot of biting flies out there."

Some bait-and-tackle shops at the Jersey shore confirmed the gnats' arrival but insisted they're tolerable with a little repellent and disappear with a stiff breeze. They also said the fishing's great, so . . . .

Most gnats - sorry, that's what we're calling them all - do not want to fly into our eyeballs or nestle in our noses, Gelhaus said. They're obnoxious but no suicidal. But why all this talk about gnats, Gelhaus asked, when there's also a plague (our word) of bloodthirsty, disease-carrying mosquitoes out all summer, in vacant city lots, at the shore and in suburban back yards.

"They are really the most consistent, obnoxious biters," he said. "They're here well into late fall."

We'll raise your Asian Tiger Mosquito, Gelhaus, with one Tabanus nigrovittatus, otherwise known as the greenhead fly, a legitimate reason for people to feel uncomfortable in New Jersey. They're not around long, but unlike mosquitoes, these flying pit bulls don't slip a siphon through your skin. They sort of chainsaw their way in.

"It's one heck of a bite," said Bill Reinert, superintendent of the Atlantic County Mosquito Control Unit.

So be thankful your Pennsylvania flies are black and not green, that your rivers are clean rather than filled with sludge, and that you have a shore to go to at all. You could live in Arizona, where there's oceans of hot rocks and sand, and where some gnats actually - I'm going to be sick - do try to drink the moisture from your eyeball.

The best we can tell you is to invest in bug repellent, wear glasses when you jog, or stay inside with the bloodsucking bedbugs.