You Can Help Keep Sprays Away

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"You see, these pests have built up a fair complex of natural enemies since their immigration to America . . . birds, rodents, other insects, and diseases. So, after an infestation, the trees leaf out again and there usually won't be another large increase in the moths' numbers for several years . . . because their predators will be more numerous following a large gypsy moth hatch, and diseases will have run rampant through the overblown moth population. Spraying, in fact, often is beneficial to the gypsy moth—though it does kill many individual insects—because it thins the pests out enough to prevent any of their diseases from reaching epidemic proportions. Because of this, the year that follows a spraying, typically, will produce a second outbreak of the pests. Some people, of course, will see this flare-up as reason enough for yet another spraying ... and so the cycle goes on.

"Also, since the `early instars'—the moth's larvae—have generally begun to disperse by the time that second spraying is made, there is a strong possibility that the insecticides help to `select' dispersion as a moth characteristic ... thereby causing the range of the bugs to spread! The entire American population of these insects, for example, was confined to eastern Massachusetts until the first DDT sprayings of the late '40's and early '50's. That `moth control' may well have been responsible for the dispersal of gypsy moths all over the Northeast and it's probably how they got to Michigan in the first place!

"To put it simply, the spraying of gypsy moths is usually the result of `pork barrel' politics . . . congressmen simply use it to bring federal money into their districts. The objective in these programs is profit rather than insect control."

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