Word: mosquito
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When nine inches of rain pounded New Orleans in one day early last month, the downpour left behind containers and pools of stagnating water that were perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. That was a bonus for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which had already picked New Orleans as the site for the first extensive test of mosquito control not by chemical or hormonal means but by another kind of mosquito...
...predator mosquito that has raised the hopes of USDA scientists is a creature with the formidable name of Toxorhynchites rutilus rutilus. During its larval stage in stagnant water, the mosquito feeds on the larvae of more common, biting and disease-carrying cousins, like the Aedes aegypti, which also breeds in pools and water-filled containers. Although the Tx. rutilus is found from Florida to Canada and as far west as Texas, it is not very prolific by insect standards and does not exist naturally in numbers large enough to control the population of other mosquitoes. That deficiency presents no problem...
...Focks will set up in New Orleans two 40-hectare (100-acre) sites, one as a control and one for experimentation. During this summer, he will release in the test area about 1,000 female Toxorhynchites, which will lay eggs that hatch into predatory larvae. Because the New Orleans mosquito control board has kept records on the Aedes aegypti for four years, any significant decrease in its numbers will be apparent. "We know the Toxorhynchites will be effective," declares Focks, "and the cost could be only pennies per acre...
Miller has moved into Washington with much command and in some two months he has brought to the board a new flexibility and crispness. Says one staffer: "We can't keep up with him. He's an electric mosquito." The former Textron Inc. chairman roams the Fed's cold marble halls at a slow jogger's pace, thrusting out his hand to someone he does not know and saying, "Hi, I'm Bill Miller." He signs memos "Bill," calls almost everyone at the Federal Reserve by his first name, and works in shirtsleeves...
...harmonic prose. His overture to a diatribe against the two-thirds Senate majority requirement for treaty approval: ''I don't know whether to start this piece with an American battleship dashing round the Horn in wartime, a biologist slicing the salivary gland of a female mosquito, a volcanic eruption killing 30,000 people . . . or the vote of the United States Senate last week on the Panama Canal...