Word: pest
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Before flying home from a Hawaiian vacation with his family in 1966, a five-year-old Miami boy packed some unusual souvenirs. Hawaii's pest-control agents waved the lad through Honolulu International Airport-never suspecting that he was lugging three brown-shelled snails. Soon after reaching home, his mother ordered him to toss the creatures into his backyard. What he tossed was an ecological bombshell. Innocently, the boy had introduced into the mainland U.S. a ferociously fertile predator: Achatina fulica, more commonly known as the giant African land snail...
...State pest-controllers are mobilizing against the marching marauders, but they face an uphill fight. Achatina, whose body can grow as long as a foot, has so few natural enemies that it can roam almost anywhere. Plagued by other recent invaders-the Bufo toad from Central America and the Asian walking catfish-Florida biologists are reluctant to import any anti-snail predators, such as the India glowworm, the hermit crab, or even more Bufos, which are known to feed on the young snails. Instead, they have begun careful spraying with insecticide (granules of metaldehyde mixed with tricalcium arsenide...
Happily, it is also one of many pest controls that can keep gardens green with out the dangers of DDT and similar chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides...
Part of his franchise was to see his master in the most majestic terms, and Bonaparte Visiting the Pest-Ridden of Jaffa, showing the conqueror touching the sores of a hapless victim of the plague, was clearly intended to portray Napoleon as the modern hero sans pareil. But the picture is redeemed by the sharply observed bodies of the stricken. David would probably have laid the scene in a bare hospital room, and Gros considered just that. But feeling the need tor a more theatrical setting for his hero, he conceived of a Moorish courtyard looking out on the ramparts...
...produced 167 million Ibs. Last year production slipped to 138 million Ibs., nearly 80% of which was exported. Not only has adverse publicity curtailed the chemical's use; its efficiency has been impaired by the resistance developed by many strains of insects. One scientist estimates that 150 pests formerly controlled by DDT are now immune to it. Nor do scientists expect to produce a new all-purpose bug killer. Instead they are emphasizing more subtle and selective methods of pest control-among them, the breeding of new insect-resistant crops, trapping pests with light and sound, and eliminating insects...