MAN’S GREATEST RIVAL.

Forest and Bird, Issue 20, 1 March 1930, Page 15

MAN’S GREATEST RIVAL.

1 The insects are man’s rivals for possession of this planet ” declares Dr. L. O. Howard, who was for thirty-three years chief 0 ? e 1 Bureau of Entomology. “They are damaging us infinitely more _ to-day than at any time since civilisation began.” these insect invaders want what we want. They eat what we live upon They are destroying our crops, ruining our oicnaids, plundering our gardens, and ravaging our forests. The most recent onslaught of the insect kingdom has been made by die Mediterranean fruit fly in the citrus groves of Florida. This pest, excluded from the United States until this - v , ea E , AV as discovered by J. C. Goodwin, nursery inspector for the Florida State Plant Bureau. On the seventh of last April he found larvae in grapefruit he was preparing for breakfast, investigation in Washington, D. C., proved them to be the larvae of the menacing Mediterranean fruit fly. Within a week hundreds of experts were at Orlando, the centre of the fight, attempting to curb the pest. Congress rushed an appropriation ot 4,AsO,(M) dollars to the stricken district. Quarantine rules

were rigidly enforced in the contaminated area. The war was -on, but the victory was far from won. The situation is serious. “The terrible thing about the Mediterranean fly,” Cyrus French Wicker declares in the September Current History, ‘‘is that from no place Avhere it has yet become strongly established has it ever been exterminated or expelled. . . . This is no unimportant or insignificant foe! This terrible and unconquerable enemy can cause our country more damage than any war in history.” But the danger of the fruit fly is only one of the numerous pests of the insect world that man is attempting to combat. The gypsy moth and the brown-tailed moth in the New England States keep thousands of men busy every spring and fall combating their advances into our forests. In the cotton belt of the South the boll weevil is the dreaded enemy. This weevil that came across the border from Mexico destroys approximately two hundred -million dollars’ worth of our cotton every year! In the Central States the corn beetle is fought by the farmer. In some localities this enemy ruins 75 per cent, of the corn crop. And while the farmer is fighting this pest, his neighbouring fruit grower in California is spending 45,000,000 dollars annually to protect his groves from scale insects and other pests. Add to these the Japanese beetle, the peach borer, the Mexican bean beetle, and the alfalfa weevil, .and you begin to see the array ■of enemies in their millionfold strength that man must constantly fight. With all our scientific research and combative measures, we are losing against the onslaught. As one writer, describing the Mediterranean fruit fly, has ably written in the Orlando Evening Reporter-Star, “It is the deadlier war between species and 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 literally off the planet. Tick and warble fly threaten his meat, chinch bug and corn beetle threaten his bread, and now comes this latest addition to the long list we already have to fight in America, to snatch the ripe fruit away from his hand.” With an ever-increasing population to consume fruits and vegetables man must find a way to combat the tiny enemies or starve to death. “Our best entomologists agree that we cannot hope to drive out these insidious destroyers of our crops and gardens,” declares Henry W. Hough; “the most we can do is to check them —perhaps for but a little while.” “Should we,” Professor Wicker concludes pessimistically, “of all nations, fail now in our endeavour, our world may, as some scientists affirm, be turned over within the course of a few centuries to the insects, and man will have lived in vain.” —Signs of the Times. —Insect-eating birds are our main ally.