Word: insects
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...glint of the copper bug-barriers caught the metal-hungry eye of Army men commandeering vital materials for industry, and the screens were melted up. Veterans of past insect wars recommend mosquito-netting canopies for the beds of those who would sleep in peace...
There is one offensive that never ends: man's battle against insects. It is a fight against the grasshoppers, the Mormon crickets, the boll weevils, the chinch bugs, the now doubly despised Japanese beetles and other pests that do two-billion-dollar damage every year in the U.S. alone; against flies, lice, roaches, mosquitoes and other infamous bugs that carry disease. Entomologists estimate that the U.S. harbors 7,000 species of insect pests. Said Entomologist Stephen Alfred Forbes of Illinois: "The struggle between man and insects began before the dawn of civilization . . . and will continue, no doubt, as long...
...insect pest, for example, must first be compared and classified before it can be efficiently combated. Evolutionary changes, which only careful comparison can verify, have appeared in some species since the type specimen was first chosen, a century or two ago. And, though any curator can catch a Musca domestica (or housefly) in his own soup, he would probably give his right ear to have the original type. Among other items selected for bomb-sheltering from the Smithsonian collection (valued at $300,000,000 but irreplaceable, says one of its officers, at three times that figure...
Smartest way for man to fight the insects who rival him for the earth's bounty is to turn insect against insect. The wasp Microbracon mellitor assassinates boll weevils (which last year destroyed 12-14% of the South's cotton), so this week an army of these stiletto-bearing flyers is being propagated at the University of Texas.* The Texas wasp dashes among cotton rows, seeks out bolls full of weevil larvae, plunges her stiletto into each grub, forces an egg through the hollow tube into each paralyzed victim, then flits on to another boll. In two days...
...Malley of Texas discovered that this wasp, a U.S. native, was a weevil parasite. In 1938, the Clayton Foundation, founded by famed Cotton-man Benjamin Clayton, put scientists to work on the wasps' use. Directed by Botanist Glenn W. Goldsmith, young Entomologist John M. Carpenter studied the insect, announced last week that it can be propagated in honey-smeared cages, released in fields to work as effectively as the unpampered outdoor variety. He is now devising equipment for mass production of the billions of wasps which cotton growers need...