Hello,
I live in the Australian outback and the pest control people can't come for another few days at the earliest, and even then I don't know how good they are (I'm pretty remote so don't have much choice...).
Last weekend I spent a fair bit of time on the couch and noticed some bites. I didn't think much of it at first. They kept appearing over the next few days and I started to worry about bed bugs. This is what some of my bites have looked like, and they're all in exposed areas that were touching the couch (the ones on my back occurred after I intentionally spent some time on the couch in my undies to see whether bites would appear in new areas that hadn't been exposed before- they appeared after I think less than 1 hour of being on the couch):
A friend was housesitting for me over christmas, and he let a backpacker he'd befriended sleep on my couch. Presumably he'd had his luggage on or near it, too. This is the most likely cause I can think of. I know there are periodically problems with bed bugs at hostels near where I live. My brother visited just before Christmas and slept on the couch for a week and didn't get any bites- he's had bad reactions to bedbugs in the past when travelling overseas.
I don't think they are in my bedroom- I've never woken up with bites this past week since I've been noticing them.
I've examined the couch- underneath it are spherical black balls, some are stuck to the floor and some are loose. If I wet them they do not smear. The floor is lino. Here's a photo, with a normal size bottle top for size comparison:
I examined the couch and found more of these loose spheres inside the sofa bed mattress, no smears or blood on any of the fabric:
I examined as much of the wood as I could, and the only suspicious thing I saw on the wood was this:
Any help with identification would be much appreciated! Thanks for your help.