Random Late-Night Thoughts
Dec. 21st, 2010 02:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaI had intended to watch the lunar eclipse, but it's clouded over so badly I can't see anything. :-(
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Huh. Fire ants eat boll weevils. Damn buggers are good for something after all.
The boll weevils arrived in the 19-teens; they spread throughout the South in the '20s and caused the cotton econoly to collapse jsut in time for the Great Depression to further screw sharecroppers into the ground. The only good outcome was that a number of regions that had been growing cotton and only cotton, and thus depleting their soil - cotton is pretty greedy - had to diversify into peanuts and (later) soybeans, much to the benefit of the soil quality.
Fire ants arrived through the port in Mobile in the '30s, just to make the Depression that much worse for everyone involved, and spread outward from there. DDT was used to control boll weevils in the '50s, but after that there was a concerted effort across entire communities to employ multiple means of containment and control. This was largely successful, especially in the '70s - but meanwhile, the fire ants were spreading, too. And it appears that at least some of the weevil suppresion was less due to human efforts, and more due to fire ants discovering that boll weevils are mighty tasty.
---
Huh. Fire ants eat boll weevils. Damn buggers are good for something after all.
The boll weevils arrived in the 19-teens; they spread throughout the South in the '20s and caused the cotton econoly to collapse jsut in time for the Great Depression to further screw sharecroppers into the ground. The only good outcome was that a number of regions that had been growing cotton and only cotton, and thus depleting their soil - cotton is pretty greedy - had to diversify into peanuts and (later) soybeans, much to the benefit of the soil quality.
Fire ants arrived through the port in Mobile in the '30s, just to make the Depression that much worse for everyone involved, and spread outward from there. DDT was used to control boll weevils in the '50s, but after that there was a concerted effort across entire communities to employ multiple means of containment and control. This was largely successful, especially in the '70s - but meanwhile, the fire ants were spreading, too. And it appears that at least some of the weevil suppresion was less due to human efforts, and more due to fire ants discovering that boll weevils are mighty tasty.
