Word: pear
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...nuisance in some eastern cities, while the replacement of horses by automobiles hit the sparrows harder than the starlings did. When rabbits were taken into Australia they proliferated enormously for lack of natural enemies. Wholesale slaughter has not suppressed them. Australia also had a distressing experience with the prickly pear - but in this case there was a happy ending. The prickly pear story, abstracted from a publication of the Imperial Bureau of Pastures & Forage Crops, was told last week in Science by Botanist Francis Ramaley of the University of Colorado...
Meanwhile the Australian Government sent agents to the Americas to see what the prickly pear's natural enemies were. The agents investigated about 150 insects that feed on cactus and nothing else, set a few of the most promising to work in Australia. By far the most potent destroyer proved to be a little moth borer, Cactoblastis cactorum. The larvae of this insect eat the inside of the pear plant, even the roots, and their depredations promote rotting due to bacteria and fungi. Armed with strings of moth borer eggs glued to strips of paper, fieldworkers swarmed through prickly...
Cactoblastis waged its war so well that prickly pear infestation has now been reduced 75% or more. Writes Professor Ramaley: ". . . The scattered remaining plants are not a menace-indeed they are of value for breeding Cactoblastis. Areas of former dense prickly pear are now being used for crops, for dairying and for grazing. . . . [This] land will never revert to its previous useless state...
...true of many Mexicans, the seat of Avila Camacho's attraction is his eyes. They are brown and full of comradely humor. His body is vaguely reminiscent of various ripe fruits-his face of a pear, his torso of a papaya. Last week the sophisticated began calling him El Buchudo, he of the double chin. Pudgy though he is, Avila Camacho keeps himself in good condition, mostly by riding and walking. A Mexican is nothing if he cannot make himself look like part of a horse. Avila Camacho's "highschool" horse Pavo (Peacock) went through his dance steps...
...gall bladder is a "pear-shaped sack . . . [which] hangs from the under surface of the liver like a droplight from a ceiling." The liver manufactures from 30 to 50 ounces of bile every day, and the overflow (up to one ounce) pours into the gall bladder. From this tank, as well as from the liver, the bile trickles into the small intestine, where it helps digest fats...