Word: bushlands
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Creative Abdication. The "we" are 4,500,000 tribesmen who speak such languages as Dagomba, Akan, Ewe and Ga and are scattered across a rectangular patch of jungle, swamp and bushland that juts into the westward bulge of Africa, north of the coast that was once called the "White Man's Grave." Seven out of ten are illiterate, more than half believe in witchcraft, yet the happy-go-lucky Gold Coasters have been chosen by Imperial Britain to pioneer its boldest experiment in African home rule. In 1951 the British gave the Gold Coast its first democratic constitution; last...
Your March 10 account of Entomologist R. C. Bushland's method of reducing the population of screwworm flies [by breeding sterile males] reminds me of the conceit that...
Following suggestions from earlier experimenters, he focused on a weakness of the flies: the females are strictly monogamous. They mate only once with one male. Then they reject other suitors and concentrate on laying eggs. So Bushland raised a flock of flies on a mixture of blood and hamburger and irradiated them heavily with X rays. This treatment made them sterile. When the X-rayed males mated with fertile wild females, the females laid infertile eggs...
Since the X-ray process was expensive, Bushland is now experimenting at Oak Ridge with radioactive cobalt, a cheap source of sterilizing radiation. Soon he plans to go south and hatch clouds of flies out of washtubs full of hamburger. One pound of hamburger, he figures, is good for 500 flies...
...will be liberated in heavily infested districts. The females among them will do m damage to the cattle: they can lay no normal eggs. The males, sterile but still ambitious, will scour the country for fertile wild mates. But the females that they win will never lay fertile eggs. Bushland believes that "extensive use of this method will have a profoundly depressing effect on the screwworm fly population...