A Plague of Moths

A Plague of Moths Despite July's heat and humidity, large areas from Maine to New Jersey look as if spring were just beginning. Big shade trees that should be fully verdant wear a thin green lace of tiny leaflets. It is, in fact, a second summer growth of foliage. The trees had earlier been stripped of all their leaves in one of the worst attacks by voracious pests ever recorded in the U.S. Northeast. If the attacks continue for another year or two, many trees will lose their strength to blossom again and will die.

No More DDT. Chief defoliator is the two-inch-long larva of the gypsy moth, a fuzzy brown caterpillar with blue and red spots that daily consumes one square foot of tree leaves (but not farm crops). Almost any kind of tree leaf from maple and pine to magnolia is meat for its mandibles. What makes the gluttonous insect so Jiard to control is that it has lacked natural enemies. It was imported from Europe to Massachusetts in 1869 by Leopold Trouvelot, a misguided naturalist who hoped to crossbreed the hardy moths with silkworms and start a new textile industry. Instead, when the bugs escaped their cage, he started a spreading plague. Now virtually all of New England and New Jersey, plus parts of New York and Pennsylvania, are infested by the insatiable insects. Since female moths lay their eggs not only on trees and rocks but also on vacationers' campers and trailers, all of the U.S.'s woodlands are threatened.

Man used to battle the bug by dousing forests with DDT. While the persistent pesticide killed the gypsy moth, it also wiped out beneficial insects and harmed birds. As a result, DDT had lost so much favor that when the moth population exploded last year, the bugs went mainly unsprayed. They denuded almost 1,000,000 acres of trees and laid billions of eggs for an even worse infestation this year.

To combat the new onslaught, the pesticide industry offered up a chemical poison trademarked Sevin. It is not as toxic or long-lived as DDT, but just as surely kills the caterpillars. Nonetheless, environmentalists strongly oppose Sevin because it is fatal to fresh-water insects, fingerling fish and bees. Heeding the environmentalists' warnings, residents of most infested areas this year voted against aerial spraying of pesticides and settled back to let nature take its course.

Just as expected, the gypsy moths (preceded in some places by equally ravenous spanworms) audibly began their leafy banquet on schedule this spring;-"It's awe-inspiring," said Charles S. Wood, chief of Massachusetts' bureau of insect control, when he heard millions of bugs chomping through the Cape Cod woods. "It sounds like a gentle rain in summer." Besides the chewing, naturalists say, the noise is partly the ceaseless drizzle of moth excrement and partly the rustle of falling, half-eaten leaves.

Backlash. To save their trees, some people tried using a biocide called Bacillus thuringiensis, which infects the caterpillars with a lethal virus. Smelling like musty hay, "BT" unfortunately may cause difficulties for people with allergies. Other tree owners turned to home remedies. They swatted the bugs with shovels, burned them with blow torches. Mrs. Marie Rusicka of Marlboro, N.J., actually spent three hours every day hand-picking the bugs off her trees. To keep caterpillars on the ground from climbing to the greenery, some citizens wrapped tree trunks with greased burlap bandages, then every evening stamped out the squishy bugs.

Another reaction was to blame environmentalists for the infestation. Because he recommended no aerial spraying of pesticides, Elmer Madsen of the Bristol, Conn., conservation commission received a box of squirming caterpillars from an angry resident. Someone else called him one night to complain "The noise of the worms eating is keeping me awake." This month three aspirants for political office in Bristol announced that they would run on an ecological backlash ticket. Their theme: Spray pesticides next year.

Final Solution. As the bugs now metamorphose from engorged caterpillars to egg-laying moths, federal and state agencies are stepping up efforts to stop the pests "Spread."Inspectors face the thankless task of searching campers and trailers for gypsy moth eggs. Scientists hope to put out synthetic sex lures that attract libidinous male moths to traps and doom. When the lures were tested in Mississippi, says William H. Gillespie, chairman of the National Gypsy Moth Advisory Council in Charleston, W. Va., "all the male moths did was fly around and frustrate themselves. They never did find any gals to procreate with."

Even so, nature itself may offer the final solution. Now some birds and beetles seem to have developed a taste for the pulpy caterpillars. But proof of these predators' effectiveness will not be apparent until next year, when it already may be too late for thousands of weakened trees.

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