G. I. Zoologist

G.I. Zoologist Bivouacked in the piny hills near the Han early last week, the 25th Division had its hands full digging in for the expected Chinese assault. But for the buddies of Corporal William Old even the din of Communist whistles and bugles was hardly more terrifying than his tales of poisonous mollusks, leopards, bears and 1,500-lb. Manchurian tigers roaming the Korean countryside. The fascinated G.I.s had good reason to believe that baby-faced "Buster" Old knew what he was talking about.

Youngest member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, Buster Old, a 23-year-old photo-lab technician in the Army's Signal Corps, has been an amateur zoologist since childhood, is now a highly respected, unofficial investigator for the Smithsonian Institution. Ever since August, the Smithsonian's molluskmen have been expectantly watching the mails for the tobacco tins, metal film containers and glass medicine bottles in which he has sent them nearly 500 specimens of Korean frogs, lizards, snakes, crayfish and snails.

On the way out to Korea, Old sent a few sample shipments during stopovers in Hawaii and Japan. But his snail searches really paid off when he began exploring the zoological possibilities of the battle zone. ("Hunting for snails and so forth is a wonderful thing for guys like that," explains one Smithsonian curator. "Gets their minds off the bullets whizzing around.")

Some freshwater snails that Old sent back are the first received by the Smithsonian since a shipment by a German collector in the 1890s. Some of the specimens arrived alive, making it possible to study their anatomy for the first time, and they have found Washington's alien climate so attractive that they have already begun to reproduce themselves. Old's prize find: a stream-bed that was paved with Semisulcospira amurensis, a carrier of the lung-fluke larva which causes a disease with symptoms often confused with those of tuberculosis.

Besides hunting Chinese Reds and Korean snails, Buster serves as adviser to his outfit on all matters zoological. He has taught them to recognise a poisonous snake or two, and during the pre-battle lull he gave them the word on swimming in the Han: little danger of schistosomiasis because oncomelania prefer narrow, shaded streams. A good chance of picking up paragonimiasis because the broad, open river might have Paragonimus westermani.*

* Free translation: the snails that are host to the parasite causing swimmer's itch and even nastier diseases probably won't be found in the Han. But if you want to gamble on a dose of lung flukes, the Han is pretty sure to have them.

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