Flame to the Moth

Fluttering above a crowded football stadium in Corvallis, Ore., two male tussock moths, ignoring thousands of fans, make a beeline, so to speak, toward Gary Daterman and begin circling his head. Other moths are continually drawn to the steering wheel of Daterman's auto, his clothing and almost anything he touches. In fact, Daterman has become irresistible to moths during the mating season. Their infatuation with him is a hazard of his job: to devise cunning new forms of biological warfare against insects (TIME cover, July 12).

An entomologist at the U.S. Forest Service's research labs in Corvallis, Daterman has been battling the Douglas-fir tussock moth, a major pest to the lumber industry in the Far West. In their larval stage, the voracious little insects can destroy a whole stand of valuable fir trees. For the past two years, Daterman and his colleagues at the Forest Service have been setting out forest traps baited with a man-made duplicate of the female moth's chemical sex-attractant pheromone. The object: to lure males, who can sniff out a mere trace of the powerful stuff from two miles away.

Early Warning. At present the Forest Service is deploying the chemical traps only as an early warning system to measure any sharp increase in the moths' population, which occurs about once a decade. But it is also considering stronger measures: spraying whole forests of firs with the love potion, so confusing the males that they will be unable to locate any females to mate with. Explains Daterman: "It's analogous to putting a male human into a room with his girl friend, turning out the lights and then spraying her perfume all over the place so he can't find her."

Daterman knows the pheromone's power from personal experience: "You can take a shower, shave, wash your clothes, and the moths will still find you." Nonetheless, Daterman is willing to suffer the indignity of the moths' affections for the sake of insect control. After all, he says, "it's only embarrassing in the presence of another scientist who knows what the moth has on his mind."

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