Bugaboo

Behind man's efforts to exterminate the world's insect population lies the uneasy suspicion that the insect world may some day take over his own. As Illinois Entomologist George Decker put it last week: man "is a late arrival who has attempted to displace a well-adjusted and highly versatile original population, which bars no holds to recover its lost property." In Los Angeles, Decker and his fellow bug specialists were gathered at the first annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, to exchange intelligence reports on the warfare between insect and man. By & large, their findings held little comfort for man. Among them:

P: The damage done to crops and farm land by insects, even in the bug-conscious U.S., is still immense. Said Decker: "Each year in the United States [insects] destroy crops, livestock and farm products equivalent to the entire agricultural output of the New England states, plus New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania."

P: The very abundance of modern insecticides often defeats their purpose, and trigger-happy spray gun wielders can do more harm than good. By way of example, said the University of California's A. E. Michelbacher, the practice of dousing walnut trees with DDT to control the codling moth has resulted in plagues of frosted scale and spider mites, organisms which might normally have graced a few codling moths' dinner tables.

P: The ordinary housefly is giving a lot of trouble. In most places, said Entomologist Ralph B. March, "wild housefly" populations have built up such an immunity that most are not harmed by DDT and other standard insecticides.

Some good news for growers of citrus fruit, cotton and potatoes came from Dr. Robert Metcalf. a co-worker of March's at California's Riverside Experimental Station. He and fellow workers have developed two new double-barreled insecticides that attack pests from inside plants. Called Systox and OMPA, they are a by-product of German wartime efforts to produce a nerve gas. If sprayed only on a tree trunk, Systox and OMPA work their way inside so neatly that they protect leaves that grow after the spraying is done. They seem to leave little harmful residue in fruit or vegetable crops.

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