familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively
easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies
disaster. The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’—offers our last, our only chance
to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.
The choice, after all, is ours to make. If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our
‘right to know’, and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless
and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we
must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course
is open to us. A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is
available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage
of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative
scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are
biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of
the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas
of the vast field of biology are contributing— entomologists, pathologists, geneticists,
physiologists, biochemists, ecologists—all pouring their knowledge and their creative
inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.
‘Any science may be likened to a river,’ says a Johns Hopkins biologist, Professor Carl P.
Swanson. ‘It has its obscure and unpretentious beginning; its quiet stretches as well as its
rapids; its periods of drought as well as of fullness. It gathers momentum with the work of
many investigators and as it is fed by other streams of thought; it is deepened and broadened
by the concepts and generalizations that are gradually evolved.’
So it is with the science of biological control in its modern sense. In America it had its obscure
beginnings a century ago with the first attempts to introduce natural enemies of insects that
were proving troublesome to farmers, an effort that sometimes moved slowly or not at all, but
now and again gathered speed and momentum under the impetus of an outstanding success. It
had its period of drought when workers in applied entomology, dazzled by the spectacular new
insecticides of the 1940s, turned their backs on all biological methods and set foot on ‘the
treadmill of chemical control’. But the goal of an insect-free world continued to recede. Now at
last, as it has become apparent that the heedless and unrestrained use of chemicals is a greater
menace to ourselves than to the targets, the river which is the science of biotic control flows
again, fed by new streams of thought.
Some of the most fascinating of the new methods are those that seek to turn the strength of a
species against itself—to use the drive of an insect’s life forces to destroy it. The most
spectacular of these approaches is the ‘male sterilization’ technique developed by the chief of
the United States Department of Agriculture’s Entomology Research Branch, Dr. Edward
Knipling, and his associates. About a quarter of a century ago Dr. Knipling startled his colleagues
by proposing a unique method of insect control. If it were possible to sterilize and release large
numbers of insects, he theorized, the sterilized males would, under certain conditions, compete
with the normal wild males so successfully that, after repeated releases, only infertile eggs
would be produced and the population would die out.
The proposal was met with bureaucratic inertia and with skepticism from scientists, but the
idea persisted in Dr. Knipling’s mind. One major problem remained to be solved before it could
be put to the test—a practical method of insect sterilization had to be found. Academically, the
fact that insects could be sterilized by exposure to X-ray had been known since 1916, when an
entomologist by the name of G. A. Runner reported such sterilization of cigarette beetles.
Hermann Muller’s pioneering work on the production of mutations by X-ray opened up vast
new areas of thought in the late 1920s, and by the middle of the century various workers had
reported the sterilization by X-rays or gamma rays of at least a dozen species of insects.
But these were laboratory experiments, still a long way from practical application. About 1950,
Dr. Knipling launched a serious effort to turn insect sterilization into a weapon that would wipe
out a major insect enemy of livestock in the South, the screw-worm fly. The females of this
species lay their eggs in any open wound of a warm-blooded animal. The hatching larvae are
parasitic, feeding on the flesh of the host. A full-grown steer may succumb to a heavy
infestation in 10 days, and livestock losses in the United States have been estimated at
$40,000,000 a year. The toll of wildlife is harder to measure, but it must be great. Scarcity of
deer in some areas of Texas is attributed to the screw-worm. This is a tropical or sub-tropical
insect, inhabiting South and Central America and Mexico, and in the United States normally
restricted to the Southwest. About 1933, however, it was accidentally introduced into Florida,
where the climate allowed it to survive over winter and to establish populations. It even pushed
into southern Alabama and Georgia, and soon the livestock industry of the southeastern states
was faced with annual losses running to $20,000,000.
A vast amount of information on the biology of the screw-worm had been accumulated over
the years by Agriculture Department scientists in Texas. By 1954, after some preliminary field
trials on Florida islands, Dr. Knipling was ready for a full-scale test of his theory. For this, by
arrangement with the Dutch Government, he went to the island of Curaçao in the Caribbean,
cut off from the mainland by at least 50 miles of sea. Beginning in August 1954, screw-worms
reared and sterilized in an Agriculture Department laboratory in Florida were flown to Curaçao
and released from airplanes at the rate of about 400 per square mile per week. Almost at once
the number of egg masses deposited on experimental goats began to decrease, as did their
fertility. Only seven weeks after the releases were started, all eggs were infertile. Soon it was
impossible to find a single egg mass, sterile or otherwise. The screw-worm had indeed been
eradicated on Curaçao. The resounding success of the Curaçao experiment whetted the
appetites of Florida livestock raisers for a similar feat that would relieve them of the scourge of
screw-worms. Although the difficulties here were relatively enormous—an area 300 times as
large as the small Caribbean island—in 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture and
the State of Florida joined in providing funds for an eradication effort. The project involved the
weekly production of about 50 million screw-worms at a specially constructed ‘fly factory’, the
use of 20 light airplanes to fly prearranged flight patterns, five to six hours daily, each plane
carrying a thousand paper cartons, each carton containing 200 to 400 irradiated flies.
The cold winter of 1957-58, when freezing temperatures gripped northern Florida, gave an
unexpected opportunity to start the program while the screw-worm populations were reduced
and confined to a small area. By the time the program was considered complete at the end of
17 months, 31⁄2 billion artificially reared, sterilized flies had been released over Florida and
sections of Georgia and Alabama. The last-known animal wound infestation that could be
attributed to screwworms occurred in February 1959. In the next few weeks several adults
were taken in traps. Thereafter no trace of the screwworm could be discovered. Its extinction in
the Southeast had been accomplished—a triumphant demonstration of the worth of scientific
creativity, aided by thorough basic research, persistence, and determination.
Now a quarantine barrier in Mississippi seeks to prevent the re-entrance of the screw-worm
from the Southwest, where it is firmly entrenched. Eradication there would be a formidable
undertaking, considering the vast areas involved and the probability of re-invasion from
Mexico. Nevertheless, the stakes are high and the thinking in the Department seems to be that
some sort of program, designed at least to hold the screw-worm populations at very low levels,
may soon be attempted in Texas and other infested areas of the Southwest. . . .
The brilliant success of the screw-worm campaign has stimulated tremendous interest in
applying the same methods to other insects. Not all, of course, are suitable subjects for this
technique, much depending on details of the life history, population density, and reactions to
radiation. Experiments have been undertaken by the British in the hope that the method could
be used against the tsetse fly in Rhodesia. This insect infests about a third of Africa, posing a
menace to human health and preventing the keeping of livestock in an area of some 41⁄2 million
square miles of wooded grasslands. The habits of the tsetse differ considerably from those of
the screw-worm fly, and although it can be sterilized by radiation some technical difficulties
remain to be worked out before the method can be applied.
The British have already tested a large number of other species for susceptibility to radiation.
United States scientists have had some encouraging early results with the melon fly and the
oriental and Mediterranean fruit flies in laboratory tests in Hawaii and field tests on the remote
island of Rota. The corn borer and the sugarcane borer are also being tested. There are
possibilities, too, that insects of medical importance might be controlled by sterilization. A
Chilean scientist has pointed out that malaria-carrying mosquitoes persist in his country in spite
of insecticide treatment; the release of sterile males might then provide the final blow needed
to eliminate this population.
The obvious difficulties of sterilizing by radiation have led to search for an easier method of
accomplishing similar results, and there is now a strongly running tide of interest in chemical
sterilants. Scientists at the Department of Agriculture laboratory in Orlando, Florida, are now
sterilizing the housefly in laboratory experiments and even in some field trials, using chemicals
incorporated in suitable foods. In a test on an island in the Florida Keys in 1961, a population of
flies was nearly wiped out within a period of only five weeks. Repopulation of course followed
from nearby islands, but as a pilot project the test was successful. The Department’s
excitement about the promise of this method is easily understood. In the first place, as we have
seen, the housefly has now become virtually uncontrollable by insecticides. A completely new
method of control is undoubtedly needed. One of the problems of sterilization by radiation is
that this requires not only artificial rearing but the release of sterile males in larger number
than are present in the wild population. This could be done with the screw-worm, which is
actually not an abundant insect. With the housefly, however, more than doubling the
population through releases could be highly objectionable, even though the increase would be
only temporary. A chemical sterilant, on the other hand, could be combined with a bait
substance and introduced into the natural environment of the fly; insects feeding on it would
become sterile and in the course of time the sterile flies would predominate and the insects
would breed themselves out of existence. The testing of chemicals for a sterilizing effect is
much more difficult than the testing of chemical poisons. It takes 30 days to evaluate one
chemical—although, of course, a number of tests can be run concurrently. Yet between April
1958 and December 1961 several hundred chemicals were screened at the Orlando laboratory
for a possible sterilizing effect.
The Department of Agriculture seems happy to have found among these even a handful of
chemicals that show promise. Now other laboratories of the Department are taking up the
problem, testing chemicals against stable flies, mosquitoes, boll weevils, and an assortment of
fruit flies. All this is presently experimental but in the few years since work began on
chemosterilants the project has grown enormously. In theory it has many attractive features.
Dr. Knipling has pointed out that effective chemical insect sterilization ‘might easily outdo some
of the best of known insecticides.’ Take an imaginary situation in which a population of a
million insects is multiplying five times in each generation. An insecticide might kill 90 per cent
of each generation, leaving 125,000 insects alive after the third generation. In contrast, a
chemical that would produce 90 per cent sterility would leave only 125 insects alive.
On the other side of the coin is the fact that some extremely potent chemicals are involved. It is
fortunate that at least during these early stages most of the men working with chemosterilants
seem mindful of the need to find safe chemicals and safe methods of application. Nonetheless,
suggestions are heard here and there that these sterilizing chemicals might be applied as aerial
sprays—for example, to coat the foliage chewed by gypsy moth larvae. To attempt any such
procedure without thorough advance research on the hazards involved would be the height of
irresponsibility. If the potential hazards of the chemosterilants are not constantly borne in mind
we could easily find ourselves in even worse trouble than that now created by the insecticides.
The sterilants currently being tested fall generally into two groups, both of which are extremely
interesting in their mode of action. The first are intimately related to the life processes, or
metabolism, of the cell; i.e., they so closely resemble a substance the cell or tissue needs that
the organism ‘mistakes’ them for the true metabolite and tries to incorporate them in its
normal building processes. But the fit is wrong in some detail and the process comes to a halt.
Such chemicals are called antimetabolites.
The second group consists of chemicals that act on the chromosomes, probably affecting the
gene chemicals and causing the chromosomes to break up. The chemosterilants of this group
are alkylating agents, which are extremely reactive chemicals, capable of intense cell
destruction, damage to chromosomes, and production of mutations. It is the view of Dr. Peter
Alexander of the Chester Beatty Research Institute in London that ‘any alkylating agent which is
effective in sterilizing insects would also be a powerful mutagen and carcinogen.’ Dr. Alexander
feels that any conceivable use of such chemicals in insect control would be ‘open to the most
severe objections’. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the present experiments will lead not to
actual use of these particular chemicals but to the discovery of others that will be safe and also
highly specific in their action on the target insect. . . .
Some of the most interesting of the recent work is concerned with still other ways of forging
weapons from the insect’s own life processes. Insects produce a variety of venoms, attractants,
repellents. What is the chemical nature of these secretions? Could we make use of them as,
perhaps, very selective insecticides? Scientists at Cornell University and elsewhere are trying to
find answers to some of these questions, studying the defense mechanisms by which many
insects protect themselves from attack by predators, working out the chemical structure of
insect secretions. Other scientists are working on the so-called ‘juvenile hormone’, a powerful
substance which prevents metamorphosis of the larval insect until the proper stage of growth
has been reached.
Perhaps the most immediately useful result of this exploration of insect secretion is the
development of lures, or attractants. Here again, nature has pointed the way. The gypsy moth
is an especially intriguing example. The female moth is too heavy-bodied to fly. She lives on or
near the ground, fluttering about among low vegetation or creeping up tree trunks. The male,
on the contrary, is a strong flier and is attracted even from considerable distances by a scent
released by the female from special glands. Entomologists have taken advantage of this fact for
a good many years, laboriously preparing this sex attractant from the bodies of the female
moths. It was then used in traps set for the males in census operations along the fringe of the
insect’s range. But this was an extremely expensive procedure. Despite the much publicized
infestations in the northeastern states, there were not enough gypsy moths to provide the
material, and handcollected female pupae had to be imported from Europe, sometimes at a
cost of half a dollar per tip. It was a tremendous breakthrough, therefore, when, after years of
effort, chemists of the Agriculture Department recently succeeded in isolating the attractant.
Following upon this discovery was the successful preparation of a closely related synthetic
material from a constituent of castor oil; this not only deceives the male moths but is
apparently fully as attractive as the natural substance.
As little as one microgram (1/1,000,000 gram) in a trap is an effective lure. All this is of much
more than academic interest, for the new and economical ‘gyplure’ might be used not merely in
census operations but in control work. Several of the more attractive possibilities are now being
tested. In what might be termed an experiment in psychological warfare, the attractant is
combined with a granular material and distributed by planes. The aim is to confuse the male
moth and alter the normal behavior so that, in the welter of attractive scents, he cannot find
the true scent trail leading to the female. This line of attack is being carried even further in
experiments aimed at deceiving the male into attempting to mate with a spurious female. In
the laboratory, male gypsy moths have attempted copulation with chips of wood, vermiculite,
and other small, inanimate objects, so long as they were suitably impregnated with gyplure.
Whether such diversion of the mating instinct into nonproductive channels would actually serve
to reduce the population remains to be tested, but it is an interesting possibility.
The gypsy moth lure was the first insect sex attractant to be synthesized, but probably there
will soon be others. A number of agricultural insects are being studied for possible attractants
that man could imitate. Encouraging results have been obtained with the Hessian fly and the
tobacco hornworm. Combinations of attractants and poisons are being tried against several
insect species. Government scientists have developed an attractant called methyl-eugenol,
which males of the oriental fruit fly and the melon fly find irresistible. This has been combined
with a poison in tests in the Bonin Islands 450 miles south of Japan. Small pieces of fiberboard
were impregnated with the two chemicals and were distributed by air over the entire island
chain to attract and kill the male flies. This program of ‘male annihilation’ was begun in 1960: a
year later the Agriculture Department estimated that more than 99 per cent of the population
had been eliminated. The method as here applied seems to have marked advantages over the
conventional broadcasting of insecticides. The poison, an organic phosphorus chemical, is
confined to squares of fiberboard which are unlikely to be eaten by wildlife; its residues,
moreover, are quickly dissipated and so are not potential contaminants of soil or water.
But not all communication in the insect world is by scents that lure or repel. Sound also may be
a warning or an attraction. The constant stream of ultrasonic sound that issues from a bat in
flight (serving as a radar system to guide it through darkness) is heard by certain moths,
enabling them to avoid capture. The wing sounds of approaching parasitic flies warn the larvae
of some sawflies to herd together for protection. On the other hand, the sounds made by
certain wood-boring insects enable their parasites to find them, and to the male mosquito the
wingbeat of the female is a siren song.
What use, if any, can be made of this ability of the insect to detect and react to sound? As yet in
the experimental stage, but nonetheless interesting, is the initial success in attracting male
mosquitoes to playback recordings of the flight sound of the female. The males were lured to a
charged grid and so killed. The repellent effect of bursts of ultrasonic sound is being tested in
Canada against corn borer and cutworm moths. Two authorities on animal sound, Professors
Hubert and Mable Frings of the University of Hawaii, believe that a field method of influencing
the behavior of insects with sound only awaits discovery of the proper key to unlock and apply
the vast existing knowledge of insect sound production and reception. Repellent sounds may
offer greater possibilities than attractants. The Fringses are known for their discovery that
starlings scatter in alarm before a recording of the distress cry of one of their fellows; perhaps
somewhere in this fact is a central truth that may be applied to insects. To practical men of
industry the possibilities seem real enough so that at least one major electronic corporation is
preparing to set up a laboratory to test them.
Sound is also being tested as an agent of direct destruction. Ultrasonic sound will kill all
mosquito larvae in a laboratory tank; however, it kills other aquatic organisms as well. In other
experiments, blowflies, mealworms, and yellow fever mosquitoes have been killed by airborne
ultrasonic sound in a matter of seconds. All such experiments are first steps toward wholly new
concepts of insect control which the miracles of electronics may some day make a reality. . . .
The new biotic control of insects is not wholly a matter of electronics and gamma radiation and
other products of man’s inventive mind. Some of its methods have ancient roots, based on the
knowledge that, like ourselves, insects are subject to disease. Bacterial infections sweep
through their populations like the plagues of old; under the onset of a virus their hordes sicken
and die. The occurrence of disease in insects was known before the time of Aristotle; the
maladies of the silkworm were celebrated in medieval poetry; and through study of the
diseases of this same insect the first understanding of the principles of infectious disease came
to Pasteur. Insects are beset not only by viruses and bacteria but also by fungi, protozoa,
microscopic worms, and other beings from all that unseen world of minute life that, by and
large, befriends mankind. For the microbes include not only disease organisms but those that
destroy waste matter, make soils fertile, and enter into countless biological processes like
fermentation and nitrification. Why should they not also aid us in the control of insects? One of
the first to envision such use of microorganisms was the 19th-century zoologist Elie
Metchnikoff. During the concluding decades of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries
the idea of microbial control was slowly taking form. The first conclusive proof that an insect
could be brought under control by introducing a disease into its environment came in the late
1930s with the discovery and use of milky disease for the Japanese beetle, which is caused by
the spores of a bacterium belonging to the genus Bacillus. This classic example of bacterial
control has a long history of use in the eastern part of the United States, as I have pointed out
in Chapter 7.
High hopes now attend tests of another bacterium of this genus—Bacillus thuringiensis—
originally discovered in Germany in 1911 in the province of Thuringia, where it was found to
cause a fatal septicemia in the larvae of the flour moth. This bacterium actually kills by
poisoning rather than by disease. Within its vegetative rods there are formed, along with
spores, peculiar crystals composed of a protein substance highly toxic to certain insects,
especially to the larvae of the mothlike lepidopteras. Shortly after eating foliage coated with
this toxin the larva suffers paralysis, stops feeding, and soon dies. For practical purposes, the
fact that feeding is interrupted promptly is of course an enormous advantage, for crop damage
stops almost as soon as the pathogen is applied. Compounds containing spores of Bacillus
thuringiensis are now being manufactured by several firms in the United States under various
trade names. Field tests are being made in several countries: in France and Germany against
larvae of the cabbage butterfly, in Yugoslavia against the fall webworm, in the Soviet Union
against a tent caterpillar. In Panama, where tests were begun in 1961, this bacterial insecticide
may be the answer to one or more of the serious problems confronting banana growers. There
the root borer is a serious pest of the banana, so weakening its roots that the trees are easily
toppled by wind. Dieldrin has been the only chemical effective against the borer, but it has now
set in motion a chain of disaster. The borers are becoming resistant. The chemical has also
destroyed some important insect predators and so has caused an increase in the tortricids—
small, stout-bodied moths whose larvae scar the surface of the bananas. There is reason to
hope the new microbial insecticide will eliminate both the tortricids and the borers and that it
will do so without upsetting natural controls.
In eastern forests of Canada and the United States bacterial insecticides may be one important
answer to the problems of such forest insects as the budworms and the gypsy moth. In 1960
both countries began field tests with a commercial preparation of Bacillus thuringiensis. Some
of the early results have been encouraging. In Vermont, for example, the end results of
bacterial control were as good as those obtained with DDT. The main technical problem now is
to find a carrying solution that will stick the bacterial spores to the needles of the evergreens.
On crops this is not a problem—even a dust can be used. Bacterial insecticides have already
been tried on a wide variety of vegetables, especially in California. Meanwhile, other perhaps
less spectacular work is concerned with viruses. Here and there in California fields of young
alfalfa are being sprayed with a substance as deadly as any insecticide for the destructive alfalfa
caterpillar—a solution containing a virus obtained from the bodies of caterpillars that have died
because of infection with this exceedingly virulent disease. The bodies of only five diseased
caterpillars provide enough virus to treat an acre of alfalfa. In some Canadian forests a virus
that affects pine sawflies has proved so effective in control that it has replaced insecticides.
Scientists in Czechoslovakia are experimenting with protozoa against webworms and other
insect pests, and in the United States a protozoan parasite has been found to reduce the
egglaying potential of the corn borer. To some the term microbial insecticide may conjure up
pictures of bacterial warfare that would endanger other forms of life. This is not true. In
contrast to chemicals, insect pathogens are harmless to all but their intended targets. Dr.
Edward Steinhaus, an outstanding authority on insect pathology, has stated emphatically that
there is ‘no authenticated recorded instance of a true insect pathogen having caused an
infectious disease in a vertebrate animal either experimentally or in nature.’
The insect pathogens are so specific that they infect only a small group of insects—sometimes a
single species. Biologically they do not belong to the type of organisms that cause disease in
higher animals or in plants. Also, as Dr. Steinhaus points out, outbreaks of insect disease in
nature always remain confined to insects, affecting neither the host plants nor animals feeding
on them. Insects have many natural enemies—not only microbes of many kinds but other
insects. The first suggestion that an insect might be controlled by encouraging its enemies is
generally credited to Erasmus Darwin about 1800. Probably because it was the first generally
practiced method of biological control, this setting of one insect against another is widely but
erroneously thought to be the only alternative to chemicals. In the United States the true
beginnings of conventional biological control date from 1888 when Albert Koebele, the first of a
growing army of entomologist explorers, went to Australia to search for natural enemies of the
cottony cushion scale that threatened the California citrus industry with destruction. As we
have seen in Chapter 15, the mission was crowned with spectacular success, and in the century
that followed the world has been combed for natural enemies to control the insects that have
come uninvited to our shores. In all, about 100 species of imported predators and parasites
have become established. Besides the vedalia beetles brought in by Koebele, other
importations have been highly successful. A wasp imported from Japan established complete
control of an insect attacking eastern apple orchards. Several natural enemies of the spotted
alfalfa aphid, an accidental import from the Middle East, are credited with saving the California
alfalfa industry. Parasites and predators of the gypsy moth achieved good control, as did the
Tiphia wasp against the Japanese beetle. Biological control of scales and mealy bugs is
estimated to save California several millions of dollars a year—indeed, one of the leading
entomologists of that state, Dr. Paul DeBach, has estimated that for an investment of
$4,000,000 in biological control work California has received a return of $100,000,000.
Examples of successful biological control of serious pests by importing their natural enemies are
to be found in some 40 countries distributed over much of the world. The advantages of such
control over chemicals are obvious: it is relatively inexpensive, it is permanent, it leaves no
poisonous residues. Yet biological control has suffered from lack of support. California is
virtually alone among the states in having a formal program in biological control, and many
states have not even one entomologist who devotes full time to it. Perhaps for want of support
biological control through insect enemies has not always been carried out with the scientific
thoroughness it requires—exacting studies of its impact on the populations of insect prey have
seldom been made, and releases have not always been made with the precision that might
spell the difference between success and failure.
The predator and the preyed upon exist not alone, but as part of a vast web of life, all of which
needs to be taken into account. Perhaps the opportunities for the more conventional types of
biological control are greatest in the forests. The farmlands of modern agriculture are highly
artificial, unlike anything nature ever conceived. But the forests are a different world, much
closer to natural environments. Here, with a minimum of help and a maximum of
noninterference from man, Nature can have her way, setting up all that wonderful and intricate
system of checks and balances that protects the forest from undue damage by insects.
In the United States our foresters seem to have thought of biological control chiefly in terms of
introducing insect parasites and predators. The Canadians take a broader view, and some of the
Europeans have gone farthest of all to develop the science of ‘forest hygiene’ to an amazing
extent. Birds, ants, forest spiders, and soil bacteria are as much a part of a forest as the trees, in
the view of European foresters, who take care to inoculate a new forest with these protective
factors. The encouragement of birds is one of the first steps. In the modern era of intensive
forestry the old hollow trees are gone and with them homes for woodpeckers and other tree-
nesting birds. This lack is met by nesting boxes, which draw the birds back into the forest. Other
boxes are specially designed for owls and for bats, so that these creatures may take over in the
dark hours the work of insect hunting performed in daylight by the small birds.
But this is only the beginning. Some of the most fascinating control work in European forests
employs the forest red ant as an aggressive insect predator—a species which, unfortunately,
does not occur in North America. About 25 years ago Professor Karl Gösswald of the University
of Würzburg developed a method of cultivating this ant and establishing colonies. Under his
direction more than 10,000 colonies of the red ant have been established in about 90 test areas
in the German Federal Republic. Dr. Gösswald’s method has been adopted in Italy and other
countries, where ant farms have been established to supply colonies for distribution in the
forests. In the Apennines, for example, several hundred nests have been set out to protect
reforested areas. ‘Where you can obtain in your forest a combination of birds’ and ants’
protection together with some bats and owls, the biological equilibrium has already been
essentially improved,’ says Dr. Heinz Ruppertshofen, a forestry officer in Mölln, Germany, who
believes that a single introduced predator or parasite is less effective than an array of the
‘natural companions’ of the trees.
New ant colonies in the forests at Mölln are protected from woodpeckers by wire netting to
reduce the toll. In this way the woodpeckers, which have increased by 400 per cent in 10 years
in some of the test areas, do not seriously reduce the ant colonies, and pay handsomely for
what they take by picking harmful caterpillars off the trees. Much of the work of caring for the
ant colonies (and the birds’ nesting boxes as well) is assumed by a youth corps from the local
school, children 10 to 14 years old. The costs are exceedingly low; the benefits amount to
permanent protection of the forests. Another extremely interesting feature of Dr.
Ruppertshofen’s work is his use of spiders, in which he appears to be a pioneer. Although there
is a large literature on the classification and natural history of spiders, it is scattered and
fragmentary and deals not at all with their value as an agent of biological control. Of the 22,000
known kinds of spiders, 760 are native to Germany (and about 2000 to the United States).
Twenty-nine families of spiders inhabit German forests. To a forester the most important fact
about a spider is the kind of net it builds. The wheel-net spiders are most important, for the
webs of some of them are so narrow-meshed that they can catch all flying insects. A large web
(up to 16 inches in diameter) of the cross spider bears some 120,000 adhesive nodules on its
strands. A single spider may destroy in her life of 18 months an average of 2000 insects. A
biologically sound forest has 50 to 150 spiders to the square meter (a little more than a square
yard). Where there are fewer, the deficiency may be remedied by collecting and distributing the
baglike cocoons containing the eggs. ‘Three cocoons of the wasp spider [which occurs also in
America] yield a thousand spiders, which can catch 200,000 flying insects,’ says Dr.
Ruppertshofen. The tiny and delicate young of the wheel-net spiders that emerge in the spring
are especially important, he says, ‘as they spin in a teamwork a net umbrella above the top
shoots of the trees and thus protect the young shoots against the flying insects.’ As the spiders
molt and grow, the net is enlarged.
Canadian biologists have pursued rather similar lines of investigation, although with differences
dictated by the fact that North American forests are largely natural rather than planted, and
that the species available as aids in maintaining a healthy forest are somewhat different. The
emphasis in Canada is on small mammals, which are amazingly effective in the control of
certain insects, especially those that live within the spongy soil of the forest floor. Among such
insects are the sawflies, so-called because the female has a saw-shaped ovipositor with which
she slits open the needles of evergreen trees in order to deposit her eggs. The larvae eventually
drop to the ground and form cocoons in the peat of tamarack bogs or the duff under spruce or
pines. But beneath the forest floor is a world honeycombed with the tunnels and runways of
small mammals—whitefooted mice, voles, and shrews of various species. Of all these small
burrowers, the voracious shrews find and consume the largest number of sawfly cocoons. They
feed by placing a forefoot on the cocoon and biting off the end, showing an extraordinary
ability to discriminate between sound and empty cocoons. And for their insatiable appetite the
shrews have no rivals. Whereas a vole can consume about 200 cocoons a day, a shrew,
depending on the species, may devour up to 800! This may result, according to laboratory tests,
in destruction of 75 to 98 per cent of the cocoons present.
It is not surprising that the island of Newfoundland, which has no native shrews but is beset
with sawflies, so eagerly desired some of these small, efficient mammals that in 1958 the
introduction of the masked shrew—the most efficient sawfly predator—was attempted.
Canadian officials report in 1962 that the attempt has been successful. The shrews are
multiplying and are spreading out over the island, some marked individuals having been
recovered as much as ten miles from the point of release.
There is, then, a whole battery of armaments available to the forester who is willing to look for
permanent solutions that preserve and strengthen the natural relations in the forest. Chemical
pest control in the forest is at best a stopgap measure bringing no real solution, at worst killing
the fishes in the forest streams, bringing on plagues of insects, and destroying the natural
controls and those we may be trying to introduce. By such violent measures, says Dr.
Ruppertshofen, ‘the partnership for life of the forest is entirely being unbalanced, and the
catastrophes caused by parasites repeat in shorter and shorter periods...We, therefore, have to
put an end to these unnatural manipulations brought into the most important and almost last
natural living space which has been left for us.’ . . .
Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our
earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing
with life—with living populations and all their pressures and counter-pressures, their surges
and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide
them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable
accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.
The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental
considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been
hurled against the fabric of life—a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the
other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These
extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who
have brought to their task no ‘high-minded orientation’, no humility before the vast forces with
which they tamper. The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the
Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the
convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date
from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has
armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the
insects it has also turned them against the earth.
. . .
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