Word: infestation
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...Coetzee's allegory, lawless street gangs have seized devastated cities; ferocious insurgents infest the countryside, blowing up railway tracks, mining the roads and attacking farmsteads; bands of robbers on the highways prey on the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been driven from their homes. The government tries to keep order through a system of forced-labor camps, gulags of the veld where prisoners are obliged to sing patriotic songs while being worked to death...
...Radiation Protection Group, the EHS is also responsible for dealing with matters that crawl into the daily lives of most University employees and students. Alpert, who is officially known as the University's entomologist and pest control officer, is responsible, as Ferris says, for "wiping out the beasties" that infest the University...
There will be havoc, however, if the Malathion does not find the flies. The 200 farm products that the flies infest account for about $4 billion each year. Expensive fumigation and cold-storage treatment could save some crops, but there is no way to salvage dates, figs, olives or almonds. California need only look across the Pacific for an example of the fly's destructive power. Hawaii has been infested since 1910. The only fruit it exports in large quantities is the thick-skinned pineapple, which is immune to the bug. Says Dr. Leroy Williamson, a DOA scientist...
...inadvertently turned loose in Massachusetts by a misguided French naturalist who wanted to cross the European gypsy with the silkworm to produce a disease-resistant hybrid that would eat virtually anything, it has been munching its way across the Northeast. As many as 30,000 caterpillars can infest a single tree, and each of them can consume five or ten small leaves a day. They seem especially partial to the majestic oak but also eat fruit trees like apple and cherry, the maple and, alas, the already imperiled elm. If nothing else is available, they will nibble away at spruce...
...feast begins in late April or May, when the caterpillars first emerge from their eggs. As they finish off one tree, they swing easily to another on silken threads they secrete. Their vagabond life accounts for the name gypsy. Millions can infest a small wooded patch. As they crunch, dropping excrement and half-eaten leaves, they sound like steady rain. Some homeowners complain that the noise actually keeps them awake. The caterpillars crawl up walls, spread over driveways, drop into plates and glasses at backyard barbecues. Last month Massachusetts officials got a call from a badly flustered woman. So many...