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They should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”
Obviously then, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not adapted.
“The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”
The production of synthetic pesticides in the United States soared from 124,–259,000 pounds in 1947 to 637,666,000 pounds in 1960—more
dieldrin one of the most used insecticides today, despite the appalling destruction of wildlife that has followed its use. As tested on quail and pheasants, it has proved to be about 40 to 50 times as toxic as DDT.
For example, a sample of drinking water from an orchard area in Pennsylvania, when tested on fish in a laboratory, contained enough insecticide to kill all of the test fish in only four hours.
without as controls. The results were striking. With the aid of the marigolds the roses flourished; in the control beds they were sickly and drooping. Marigolds are now used in many places for combating nematodes.
In 1920 Australian entomologists were sent to North and South America to study insect enemies of the prickly pears in their native habitat. After trials of several species, 3 billion eggs of an Argentine moth were released in Australia in 1930. Seven years later the last dense growth of the prickly pear had been destroyed and the once uninhabitable areas reopened to settlement and grazing. The whole operation had cost less than a penny per acre. In contrast, the unsatisfactory attempts at chemical control in earlier years had cost about £10 per acre.
Charles Broley, achieved ornithological fame by banding more than 1000 young bald eagles during the years 1939–49.
Later recoveries of banded birds showed that these Florida-born eagles range northward along the coast into Canada as far as Prince Edward Island, although they had previously been considered nonmigratory.
The gypsy moth, a native of Europe, has been in the United States for nearly a hundred years. In 1869 a French scientist, Leopold Trouvelot, accidentally allowed a few of these moths to escape from his laboratory in Medford, Massachusetts, where he was attempting to cross them with silkworms.
