Science: Bugs

Many keen naturalists believe that the last great enemy of man, barring those released by his own stupidity, will be the insects. Certain it is that the problems of economic entomology and tropical hygiene are understood by all too few, and they chiefly the specialists whose business it is to fight the never-ending pests. A bureau of the U. S. Department of Agriculture devotes its whole time to this important work, and calls upon it this Summer have been particularly pressing.

Skirmishes in the anti-insect campaign :

1) The ravages of the Japanese beetle in Southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania have assumed alarming proportions, destroying all fruit and growing plants within its reach. The beetles have infested more than 700 square miles, and are increasing in geometrical progression. The damage to crops is immense. The Department of Agriculture is organizing control measures of two kinds: rigid quarantine by inspection of crop shipments; importation of five varieties of harmless insects which are the beetle’s enemies. This marshaling of one species against another by human direction will be perhaps the main tactical principle in the coming war between insects and man.

2) An unclassified insect appeared in Rapides Parish, La., and is damagingcotton on numerous plantations. It is neither a boll weevil nor an army worm, and the state entomologist, Prof. T. H. Jones, is investigating.

3) The gypsy moth is threatening again in Northern New York and New England. The state has a special Bureau for its control and has a 25-mile zone on the Eastern border under constant supervision for the study of air currents in relation to the moths. More than 6,000 toy balloons were liberated at various points to determine the prevailing course of the winds, and 400 were returned to Albany by their finders. A motorized balloon of a new type, equipped with pumps and sprayers, is used to combat the moths.

4) The Chemical Warfare Service is giving serious attention to the problem of developing a gas to destroy the worm which preys on golf greens and fairways, raising little piles of dirt. The gas must hang low and kill the worm without injuring the vegetation. The Service has already developed gases noxious to various kinds of pests, including the boll weevil.

5) The sanitary war against the mosquito and the housefly knows no armistice. While the Anopheles and Aedes aegypti, carriers of malaria and yellow fever germs, respectively, are not indigenous to the Northern States, nevertheless the common Culex is a menace to health and comfort.

6) A new beetle with a hard shell is destroying fruit and even attacking chickens, according to reports from Wheeling, W. Va.

7) The Post Office Department has forbidden the importation of foreign honey bees, owing to the infection of some with a serious disease known as the Isle of Wight malady.

8) On the other side of the world a pest of a different nature is reversing the common role of the plant and insect world. In Queensland and New South Wales, over 40,000,000 acres of fertile land have been invaded by the prickly pear in the 60 years since it was first introduced in Australia. The Government is fighting it by every conceivable means. Bonuses of £4 an acre have been offered to keep the land clear, but with little success. The prickly pear has been used for cattle fodder, paper pulp making and the production of alcohol and gasoline substitutes, but the only methods of control that offer real promise are again biological. Imported cochineal insects from Ceylon have destroyed a certain species of the pest, and other insects are being bred for completing the task. The chief danger to be avoided in biological control is the increase of the attacking species until it gets out of hand and becomes a pest itself.