INSECT WAR ON THE WORLD.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 1 May 1922, Page 8

INSECT WAR ON THE WORLD.

COTTON CROP RAVAGES,

ANTS WHICH DEVOUR BABIES.

The great War of the World was described and pictured, and its increasing virulence foretold, by Mr Lefroy at the Royal Institution, London, in a lecture as grim as it was economically important (states the London Daily Mail). The point was that man is not as dominant as he thinks he is. The real dominance belongs to the insect.

The lecturer gave 14 examples, all more or less blood-curdling. His first instance, perhaps, most immediately concerns England, and, in England, Lancashire. This is the bold weevil, which attacks the cotton plant. No kind or sort of preventive has been found after 20 years' work, and its ravages are now of such dimensions that cotton-growing is being given up wholesale in the United States. •

A famous American man of science has prophesied that in five years there will be next to no cotton at all grown in America, and the world will be 7,000,000 bales short. The ravage of this insect alone has made it compulsory for us to grow great areas^ of cotton within the Empire if the Lancashire trade is to be kept alive. Nor is the cotton weevil the worst insect. Man's most threatening enemy in the world appears to be the Argentine ant. It reached England in 1918, and has spread half over the world, especially Spain, since 1897. This minute insect has eaten babies in their cradles in the Argentine, has completely wiped out the birds of the Madeira by eating their nestlings, and is ruining both the orange and coffee harvests in many places.

It often kills the plants, not directly, but by encouraging other insects, especially green fly, which it keeps as man keeps cows. It even builds houses for them, acts as doctor to them, and defends them from enemies. At the same time the aunt, which is omnivorous, carries and spreads many of the worst human diseases. .It may, x perhaps, find a congenial home in London. Mr Lefroy said many startling things:

The flea has caijsed 7,000,000 deaths in India by carrying plague. The housefly kills 1000 children a year in England by imparting infant diarrhoea;, and flies are as numerous as they. were 500 years ago. They carry typhoid, enteric, cholera, and dysentery. Our system of sanitation in Mesopotamia was ideally designed for breeding flies. A number of women are on the verge of a nervous breakdown because of the prevalence of that almost invisible house mite which recently turned a man out of his house in Cardiff.

The beetle that destroyed the oak roof of Westminster, Hall is at work in St. Paul's and very many churches anrl old buildings. The louse is the cause of typhus in Russia, and will wipe nations out if conditions prevent cleanliness.

In spite of such horrors, Mr Lefroy said he was an optimist. Intellectual men should win against blind insects. They were working for millions of years before man arrived, and it is only ten years ago that our Board of Agriculture appointed its first economic biologist.