Separating the Good From the Bad
Japanese Beetle
goodhousekeeping.com
Praying Mantis
islandssounder.com
Eastern Tent Caterpillar
Wikimedia Commons
In school, we were taught that some life forms are better than others. Praying mantises, for example, were sacrosanct because they helped control pests. I cannot recall ever being told just which pests they killed, but pests were abundant in Hicksville when we were children. Every year, Japanese beetles came from... well, wherever they always came from, to feast on peonies, roses, or anything else they found in our gardens. Children collected them in jars; my father bought insecticidal sprays; nothing helped very much. Every so many years, tent caterpillars appeared en masse. Well-organized, they expanded their birth tents into multi-chambered dwellings. If one ventured out and found a tree with edible leaves, it laid a scent trail back to the tent. Thereafter, hundreds of its siblings would follow the trail and denude the tree of its leaves.
Daily News, May 5, 1957
Huntington Long-Islander, June 16, 1916
1957 was a boon year for the Eastern tent caterpillar. One could not ride a bicycle near any overgrown lot without hearing them pop and squish green liquid out from under the tires. The official response that year was to spray plenty of DDT everywhere. Forty-one years earlier, a communal rather than a chemical solution had worked better: children collected nests in a competition; all the nests collected were destroyed.
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