After all, did you know that when the economy is bad ...

If you popped out of a time machine at a random moment in history, how would you know whether or not the country was in a recession? There'd be obvious signs, like lots more ads for payday loan joints and offers to buy your gold for pennies on the dollar. But there are less obvious, much weirder clues all around you.

7 Mosquito Populations Surge

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The tanking economy is causing huge swarms of insects in suburban areas, namely mosquitoes. Now, if you're the clever type you might have already thought, "Well, that probably makes sense -- cities are probably cutting their mosquito-control programs because they don't have the funding." And that is certainly happening. But there's another reason for the mosquito baby boom that we're betting you'll never guess.

It's all the foreclosed houses.

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Mosquitoes are very much into the real estate market right now.

Think about it. A lot of houses have pools, and when the bank comes a-knocking, pool maintenance falls to the lowest priority on everyone's list. And as anyone who has ever owned a pool or been involved in maintaining one will testify, those bastards will go rank in a heartbeat if left to their own devices. Even a drained pool can collect stagnant rainwater, after all. And whose job is it to patrol all of these thousands of pools to keep them disinfected?

Nobody.

So, a whole bunch of foreclosed houses end up with musky, slimy cesspits of hell-water in their backyards. If you know anything about swamps, you know that filthy, standing water is the perfect breeding ground for the little blood-sucking bastards.

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And mosquitoes.

Still, this is just an increase in annoying bugs we're talking about here. Surely, that's relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things. It's not like they're carrying any potentially lethal viruses or anything.