Man v. Insects

In his fierce, unending war against the insects, man is getting exactly nowhere. There may be as many as 2,500,000 species of insects infesting the world, and in the U.S. alone about 10,000 of them are public enemies. Night & day they gnaw at crops, bore into homes and warehouses, attack men and animals.

In its yearbook for 1952, published this week (Insects, U.S. Government Printing Office; $2.50), the Department of Agriculture carries a gloomy bulletin on the war. "Although the science of entomology has made great progress in the last two decades," reports Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan, "the problems caused by insects seem to be bigger than ever. We have more insect pests, although we have better insecticides to use against them and better ways to fight them." Insect pests have already survived for 250 million years. And for all man's relentless ingenuity, says the yearbook, "no species of insect has disappeared from the earth because of man's activities . . ."

In suburban Chicago last week, heavy rains drove black swarms of crickets from field and garden. Millions of the inch-long insects oozed over the streets and hopped into homes and office buildings. Restaurants closed in the face of the invasion; a few all-night filling stations kept their driveways clear by flushing the insects down the sewer with hoses.

Local entomologists were not much help. They could only identify the insects as relatively harmless field crickets (Grylus assimilis), not half as ravenous as the grasshoppers that frequently devastate vast acres of crops. There are a few insecticides that might do some good, said the hesitant bug men. But chemists, they admitted, have concentrated on more vicious pests and have not yet bothered to develop cricket killers.

It is mating season now, said Henry S. Dybas, assistant curator at Chicago's Natural History Museum. The crickets are enjoying a "middleaged fling." Chlordane sprayed on floors, foundations and walls every seven days until the first frost might bring them under control. But until colder weather, many Chicagoans will continue to share their homes with crickets. And, in lieu of their preferred diet of grass and grain, the crickets will continue to chew on the lace curtains and starched clothing of their helpless hosts.

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