Word: insection
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...park areas have been so carefully protected from fire that the pines have become aged and thus vulnerable. Now millions of them are turning bright red and then gray as they die. Says Yellowstone Biologist Doug Houston: "The longer you suppress fires, the more we set ourselves up for insect infestation and for unnatural catastrophic fires...
...public reaction and begin the re-education process. Says Grand Teton Research Biologist Lloyd Loope: "We haven't so much an epidemic of mountain pine beetles as of overmature lodgepole pines." He warns that if the policy of putting out all fires is continued, there will be periodic insect infestations, like the endemic pine beetle problem, as well as a decrease in the diversity of p.ants, animals and birds. Loope believes that allowing natural fires to burn off 5% to 10% of the forest every ten years would "probably be sufficient" to put the great forests back into natural...
...made it economically impractical to raise cattle or horses in large areas from central Mexico to central Argentina. Efforts to destroy Desmodus rotundus by such crude methods as dynamiting or using flamethrowers in his cave roosts have proved too costly, inefficient, and disastrous for neighboring populations of beneficial, insect-eating bats...
When DDT first appeared in the U.S. in 1942, it seemed almost like a miracle drug. Cheap and efficient, it destroyed pests, reduced such insect-borne diseases as malaria, and brought bumper harvests. But over the years scientists found disturbing evidence, first publicized in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, that DDT was harmful to animals too, and might threaten man as well...
...Insect stings are a common warm-weather hazard. Except in rare cases of serious shock, treatment is often omitted. But a cheap and effective antidote is readily available in the kitchen, according to a letter in the A.M.A. Journal by Dr. Harry Arnold Jr., a Honolulu dermatologist. His prescription: a quarter-teaspoon of meat tenderizer dissolved in a teaspoon or two of water and rubbed into the skin around the bite. Meat tenderizer, Arnold explains, is rich in papain, a protein-dissolving enzyme, which breaks down the venom. Arnold says that a dose of meat tenderizer will stop the pain...