Gnat Plague

Great black clouds of insects hummed softly over eastern Arkansas last week. Above waiting fields the sun rose higher each day but on many a farm spring planting had stopped dead. Some farmers tied smudge-fire buckets to their plows, tried to go ahead. Others gave up, herded their livestock into barns, circled them with smudges. Still others, too late, found their horses and mules choked, sucked, poisoned. By the week's end nearly 1,000 horses & mules lay dead in their tracks, and desperate farmers were crying to Red Cross and Government for relief.

The deadly clouds were buffalo gnats (simuliidae) so called not because they attack buffaloes but because they have humps on their backs. Broad winged, black or brown bodied, they are less than half the size of a house fly. Commonest in the Mississippi Valley, they are closely related to the black flies which pester humans farther north. Buffalo gnats breed in swift-flowing streams, attaching their wormlike larvae to the downstream side of a large rock or log. After a month or six weeks the larvae spin cocoons, soon emerge full-grown. The first spell of warm weather sends them swarming to fields and barnyards.

Ordinarily the gnats kill only horses & mules, but last week they were reported to be destroying cattle, hogs and poultry as well. Larger animals got throats and lungs clogged with them. Some think they poison their victims, others that the chief damage is loss of blood. Arkansas veterinarians and entomologists were researching frantically last week, but expected the gnats to be gone before they could learn much. Meantime they advised farmers to smear their stock with rancid lard and kerosene, with cottonseed oil and pine tar, or with a mixture of soap, water, petroleum and powdered naphthalin. But what the farmers really hoped for were a few good hot days, which drop gnats dead as quickly as they come.

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