THE INSECT WAR.

Northern Advocate, 21 March 1925, Page 12 (Supplement)

THE INSECT WAR.

AN UNREALISED PERIL

The suburban residen who, with clectric torch and tin of lime, puts iu a part of his evening in a hunt for snails and slugs over the garden "beds, may not realise it, but he is a soldier in the army arrayed on behalf of mankind in a war on a vast scale. It is a. war against the insect pests, wliich, if they had their way, would eat humanity out of house and home. Man easily holds his own against the beasts, a writer remarks in the New York "Herald Tribune," but he is helpless against the insects. Certain scientists aver that were the insects left to work their will, and to multiply unchecked, it would be merely a matter of three years for all the green-growing things to be destroyed, and the earth rendered a desert waste. At least this American' says so. And he quotes billions of dollars in annual losses through the ravages of insects to prove it. In fact, 011 his showing, there would be a conquest of mankind somewhat on the lines already suggested by Mr. H. G. Wells. It would not be by the octopus or the ant, as Mr Wells has imagined. It would be by the swarms of insect pests which the average American brings under the general and expressive heading of "Bugs." The particular writer makes out quite a good case in this New York journal to show that nis scientists are right, though incidentally to point out that American entomologists have the matter well in hand. War—devasating, vicious, Tuthless war— is being waged day and night throughout the length and breadth of the United States, he says, and the great struggle involves the economic welfare of the American people, and, by the same token that of the whole world. It threatens the stability of the social, political, and commercial structure. It is even more menacing; it threatens the extinction of mankind upon the planet. This American is talking of the clash between the embattled farmers of America on the one side, and the 111calcuable hordes of boring, biting, sucking, gnawing insect-depredators on the other —the war of the "Bug Trinmphant." The man in the United States who knows more than any other about the big'flight is Dr. L. 0. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology at Washington. Dr Howard estimates that the saving through the discoveries of entomologists in that country is from 500,000,000 dollars to 1,000,000,000 odllars a year, though these are simply guesses. But he says,

"When we consider that from 10 per cent, to 20 per cent, of American crops is destroyed by insects every year, that they damage American interests by more than 200,000,000d013. annually; that they are far and away our worst enemies among living creatures, if we except disease-germs (which, by the way, insects carry to animals and plants as well as to human beings), entomologists leave the humorous field in which popular opinion has placed them and become defenders of the human race." It is not true that injurious insects apparently increase rather than diminish with the increase of entomologists. Fighting insects pests is no joke.

'The true master of the world are the insects, says this American. More than 300,000 kinds of insects have been classified, but there are tens of thousands still to be catalogued. But about half of the injurious species of insects now affecting America had their origin outside the United States. Dr. Howard believes that the plum "curculio" is the most notorious of the native-born insect pests, and the cotton boll weevil the worst of the imported species. The boll weevil costs the cotton growers of the south approximately' 140,000,000 dollars every year. He is being fought by aeroplanes. The planes fly as low as possible over the plantations, and distribute a powered calcium arsenate, which slowly settles upon the plants, and destroys the boll weevil—or is supposed to do so. The stories filed away in the Washington Bureau of Entomology are many and thrilling. There is the case of the fearsome work of insects in the Black Hills, where once a vast track of splendid timber stood. The forest was suddenly invaded by an army of gluttonous beetles, which succeeded in destroying timber to the value of 25, 000,000 dollars. Still, the American says, the bug was blameless according to the plan of the universe.

If man, with his highly developed intellect, his physical might, his ability to destroy with laws, machine guns or poison gas his fellow creatures, finds himself particularly helpless in combating the subtle and lowy bug, it must be an evidence of the insect's superior ingenuity over that of the human—a somewhat humiliating fact for the latter to swallow. But this is precisely the condition of things today in the matter of man's relation to the alert and industrious insect. Still the American feels that man may well place his confidence in the earnest entomologists at Washington. ,

While dozens of species of insects prey upon the apple tree it has' ro-

niained for tlie Codlin moth to stand distinguished as its worst foe. To the door of this winged rascal is laid the loss of nearly one-tenth of the apple crop in the United States, and this, with the cost of repressive measures, means a loss of 27,000,000 dollars a year. The "curculio" or "little Turk" is a simon-pure, dyed in the wool, one hundred per cent. American bug. He can trace his ancestry straight back To the Pilgrim fathers, who, it is believed, carried him into the country. He is a conservative, home-abiding blueblooded bug, and he subsists almost exclusively on the damask cheeked peach, the' purple-robed plum, with occasional incursions into the realms of the red-cloaked apple. He raises large, but decorous families, and tliey are nourished in the best orchards of the land. The peach borer is a bug of diabolical activities —a coarse, lowbrowed breed of moth far beneath the curculio in the social scale of bugdom. Without doubt the original peach borer began life in humble circumstances, living on wild cheeTies and uncultivated plums. But he has risen in life, for he lives cheek by jowl with the aristocratic curculio. Parents raise from 200 to 800 little peach borers in one family. The total annual loss through the depredations of this and other fruit eating insects is estimate at over 141,000,000 dollars.

The brown-tail moth arived in America in a consignment of roses from Holland. Washington entomologists are determined that his life shall be anything but a bed of roses in the future. Science introduced the gypsy moth into America, for in 18(18 Professor L. Trouvelot, of Harvard University, imported a dozen husky specimens from laeross the Atlantic, just to ascertain why European farmers were raising such >a hullabaloo over the doings of a harmless looking bug. He found out. Unfortunately a cluster of eggs blew out the window, and though the professor searched for miles around, literally on all fours, he could not find them. Ten years after the State of Massachusetts found out that it was the centre of a scourge of the first order. Since then the gypsy moths, heedless of .State boundary ,■ lines, have wrought destruction wholesale.

Another naturalised pest that has driven many nurserymen into bankruptcy is the notorious San Jose scale. This criminal was brought from China forty years .ago by James Lick —of Lick Observatory fame —to San Jose. Lick was noted for importing curious Oriental trees, and on some of them the scale found a secret lodging. "So sudden, so savage, so persistent are the attacks of this scale that it kills with almost bullet-like swiftness every fruit and flower bearing tree upon which it descends." It is estimated that an annual loss of

16,900,000 dollars is sustained through the appetite of insects with a fondness of tobacco plant; that the profits on the annual hay crop are reduced by parasites by 116,000,000 dollars, and that 8,400,000 dollars are lost in the sugar cane industry through parasites with ail obviously sweet tooth. The greatest direct loss of all is the well-nigh inconceivable destruction -wrought by insects on cereals; here is reported damage of over 430,000,000 dollars in one year. But a splendid, though unheralded, work is being carried forward in Washington in the effort to put on the march against all insect invaders other vast, contending armies of parasites which nature has equipped for the destruction of the farmer's chief foes. So the writer thinks that ultimately the '' Bug Triumphant" will give way to the "Bug Defeated."