World’s Greatest Thieves

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 956, 26 April 1930, Page 10

World’s Greatest Thieves

THE MENACE OF THE INSECT

(Written for THE SUN)

CABLED messages today state that a locust plague on Sinai Peninsula grows more serious, and flame-throwers have been used to check the progress of the “enemy army. ’ . - - In Transjordania 75,000 persons have been conscripted to fight locusts and a grim battle has been waged for three months. This is a major engagement in man’s struggle with the insects—the bitterest, most protracted war ever fought.

While the nations strive to outwit one another at naval conferences and in the possession of armed forces, the insects are marshalling to push the whole human race off the earth; or at least to starve it'off. So busy are we with our own quarrelling that we cannot see the danger, but it is looming so large that the more observant can sense the menace and are already calling our attention to it. Insects, caterpillars, scale pests and worms eat i what we eat. They desire what we desire, and wait until we secure it that they may raid us, plundering our granaries and rifling our crops and orchards. Despite our most determined efforts to drive them away they press the attack with relentless energy, recking little of their losses in the conflict. Dr. L. O. Howard, formerly chjef of the United States Bureau of Entomology, says: “Insects are damaging us infinitely more today than at any time since civilisation began.” We in New Zealand have to fight borers, fruit flies, tomato pests, cereal and potato scale, scale on fruit and moths. If the effort of inspectors and individual farmers in this fight were viewed in the aggregate it would appear as the labour of quite an army of men, whom we have to maintain all the year round and furnish with munitions. Over all is the loss of foods that we fail to save. In California over 45,000,000 dollars are spent every year fighting the enemies of the orchard. In some places over 75 per cent, of corn crops are loot for the Insects, while the boll weevil destroys 200,000,000 dollars’ worth of cotton every year. At one period, the Mediterranean fruit fly secured a small footing in Ponsonby and Devonport. A sharp

war by the authorities left it helpless. Now after a half-century of watchfulness it. has succeeded in circumventing the fruit inspectors of Florida. The fear of the fly is expressed m the following quotation from an American paper: “It is the deadlier wa r between species; between world bestriding man and one of the countless kinds of insects that are trying blindly, and unknowingly, but none the less desperately, to eat him off the planet. Tick and fly threaten his meat; hugs and beetles threaten his bread, and now comes this latest addition to an already long list that will snatch the ripe fruit out of his hand.” Man is an ever-increasing quantity on earth, utilising his brain to make the earth support him and his; trying to bend nature to be his slave and even moulding evolution that he may supply natural deficiencies in his food wants. But his tiny enemies, breeding in millions, surviving fire and poison, living on through droughts, reappearing after floods, ignoring territorial borders, using land, air and water for transport, grow more powerful as they feed on the loot from man’s food stores. We seem powerless to annihilate them. At most we may keep them in check, but the effort is an everincreasing one; every additional acre we plant, each additional beast we raise handicap us in the struggle by demanding more of our energy in watching it. It is potential food for our despoilers. The terrible thing about this war of the insects is its unceasing pressure. The creatures seem allied for the end, and they do not often clash. Specialisation is their weapon. One set of enemies attacks one source of food supply, and another attacks another. Thus we are fought piecemeal in a battle that is trying man’s utmost resources. T.W.