Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 178, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1919 — Annual $500,000,000 Banquet of Enemy Aliens [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Annual $500,000,000 Banquet of Enemy Aliens

-w $500,000,000 banquet to jfl alien enemies has been A given annually by the ■ American public. These aliens were not invited Jrjk VF"" here, have performed no service, and yet* have /MVrn been fed on the fat of the yv. land, adding to the high cost ot living. They have tremendous appetites, consuming trees or entire forests, garden crops and fields of grain and cotton. These undesirable citizens that have made America their adopted home are Insects and plant diseases which have been Introduced from foreign countries, writes Charles Lathrop Pack, president American Forestry association, in American Forestry. There’s a pest for every plant. Some plants have more than a thousand Insects and fungus diseases which attack some portibn of them, causing death or injury. However, most of the pests which attack our plants are native to America and have natural enemies which keep them in check. “And all those fleas have little fleas, upon their backs to bite ’em. And. those again have lesser fleas, and so “ad infinitum.” Thus native insects have a host of voracious enemies, including birds, animals, and other Insects, which preserve the “balance of nature.” The ravages of native pests seldom become devastating except occasionally in small areas and for a short time when conditions become exceedingly favorable for their rapid propagation. Hitherto, America has maintained an open door to plant immigrants and, year after yehr, destructive insects and plant diseases have come to this country on these plants from abroad. Some of these pests have found the land of freedom entirely to their liking. Sometimes the climate here has been exceptionally favorable for their rapid development, at other times they have found new food plants. In such cases they have propagated rapidly because the balance of nature was no longer maintained. In most cases the fight against imported plant pests has been begun too late. The uncontrolled ravages of the late blight and rot of potatoes in 1916 was responsible for the shortage In the potato crop which sent prices soaring. Powdery scale and scurf are two other potato diseases which have been brought in from abroad. More recently, the potato wart disease, established in Pennsylvania from European Importations, has given cause for alarm. The Hessian fly. Introduced from Europe in revolutionary times, causes an average annual loss to the wheat crop of fifty million dollars, and in some years the loss from this one insect has ' exceeded one million dollars. The loss of fruit due to the codling moth, together with the money spent in controlling this insect, costs the United States about sixteen million dollars a year. Another imported fruit insect, the San Jose scale, entails a loss of at least ten million dollars annually. The tale of the gypsy moth, in ribald rhyme, illustrates what happens when an Insect reaches the United States, from another country. To paraphrase:

There was a rrian who freed two moths, And those two moths were mothers, That year there were a million more, The next a million others. They had tremendous appetites, And wrought great devastation. Until the state with wrath arose, And fought like Carrie Nation. A fight was begun which has lasted for years and today it has cost more than fifteen million dollars in cash for applying control measures, besides many times this amount of property damage. The chestnut blight Is a bark disease which was brought to this country from the Orient on Japanese chestnut nursery stock. It was first found on western Long Island in 1904. In ten years it spread over half of th.e chestnut area of the United States and at the present time it has practically exterminated the chestnut trees within a 100-mile radius of New York and is rapidly accomplishing the complete ruin of our magnificent chestnut forests of the South. The loss is many million dollars and its ultimate end will be the extinction of one of the most useful and most profitable American forest trees, as no remedy has been found. Only recently It was found that a similar disease attacking the poplars had been Imported from, the nurseries of France and had spread over a wide area of the United States. Other dangerous pests Introduced from abroad are the Oriental peach moth, the Japanese beetle, the European earwig, the Leopard moth, the alfalfa weevil, the European eelworm. The European corn borer is a pest which appareptly was brought to the United States in a cargo of hemp unloaded at a rope factory near Boston. It is exceedingly destructive to corn, feeding by boring in the stalk. In its operation it works upward, eating out a chamber from the pith. The developing ears are also sometimes hollowed out. As high as 90 per cent of

the stalks in a corn field may be infested. Over two hundred borers have been found in the stalks growing in one hill of corn. Control is made more difficult by the fact that the borer feeds on a number of other plants, including the stalks of weeds and flowers, and may live over winter in grass roots. It is so menacing that the present agricultural department appropriation bill contains an item of $250,00C for fighting it. The bureau of entomology. United States department of agriculture, has published descriptions of over 3,000 distinct insect pests which are Ukelj to be introduced into this country and cause serious loss. About half of these are European Insects which feed upon forest and shade trees and the rest Infest various cultivated crops Among the Important Insects which 11 Is hoped to exclude from the American continent are the Mediterranean fruit fly, considered by entomologists to take first prize as a destructive fruit pest, and the pink boll worm of cotton, from Mexico, which is capable of making the best efforts of cotton boll weevil appear puny in comparison. The life stories of some of these pests, as unfolded by years of study on the part of patient scientists, are so amazing as to be classed with fairy stories by those who are little acquainted with the wonders of nature, White pine blister rust is an Instance. This parasitic fungus is native to the old world, attacking the stone pine and other native five-leaved pines of Europe. White pines Imported from Germany, France and Holland, brought this disease to the United States, principally in 1908 and 1909. Curiously, the safety of our white pines depends entirely on whether we can control the spread of the disease on currant and gooseberry bushes. The fungus cannot go directly from one pine tree to another but first must spend part of its life on currant or gooseberry leaves and in- this stage it has the power of spreading rapidly and widely to other currant and gooseberry bushes. The fungus then develops another stage by which it is enabled to pass back to the pines. If we destroy the currant and gooseberry bushes we prevent the disease from infecting our white pines. Hence, the salvation of these magnificent trees depends to a large degree on whether people are willing to forego the luxury of currant Jelly and gooseberry jam. The system of inspecting the importations of foreign ’ nursery stock has proved ineffectual because the eyesight of the most competent inspector Is not capable of discovering every insect or plant disease on every plant. Many of them, especially fungi, are hidden under the bark and are entirely invisible. It must be remembered that of many of these pests we have no conception. based on experience in its native land, as to its destructive powers under American conditions. The question “what shall we do about it?” has been answered correctly by the federal embargo, which prohibits further importation of plants from abroad except such as are specifically sanctioned by the United States department of agriculture.