Silent Spring (23 page)

Truck gardeners also suffered. Some leaf crops were so burned and spotted as to be unmarketable. Others carried heavy residues; a sample of peas analyzed at Cornell University's Agricultural Experiment Station contained 14 to 20 parts per million of DDT The legal maximum is 7 parts per million. Growers therefore had to sustain heavy losses or find themselves in the position of selling produce carrying illegal residues. Some of them sought and collected damages.

As the aerial spraying of DDT increased, so did the number of suits filed in the courts. Among them were suits brought by beekeepers in several areas of New York State. Even before the 1957 spraying, the beekeepers had suffered heavily from use of DDT in orchards. "Up to 1953 I had regarded as gospel everything that emanated from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the agricultural colleges," one of them remarked bitterly. But in May of that year this man lost 800 colonies after the state had sprayed a large area. So widespread and heavy was the loss that 14 other beekeepers joined him in suing the state for a quarter of a million dollars in damages. Another beekeeper, whose 400 colonies were incidental targets of the 1957 spray, reported that 100 per cent of the field force of bees (the workers out gathering nectar and pollen for the hives) had been killed in forested areas and up to 50 per cent in farming areas sprayed less intensively. "It is a very distressful thing," he wrote, "to walk into a yard in May and not hear a bee buzz."

The gypsy moth programs were marked by many acts of irresponsibility. Because the spray planes were paid by the gallon rather than by the acre there was no effort to be conservative, and many properties were sprayed not once but several times. Contracts for aerial spraying were in at least one case awarded to an out-of-state firm with no local address, which had not complied with the legal requirement of registering with state officials for the purpose of establishing legal responsibility. In this exceedingly slippery situation, citizens who suffered direct financial loss from damage to apple orchards or bees discovered that there was no one to sue.

After the disastrous 1957 spraying the program was abruptly and drastically curtailed, with vague statements about "evaluating" previous work and testing alternative insecticides. Instead of the 3½ million acres sprayed in 1957, the treated areas fell to ½ million in 1958 and to about 100,000 acres in 1959, 1960, and 1961. During this interval, the control agencies must have found news from Long Island disquieting. The gypsy moth had reappeared there in numbers. The expensive spraying operation that had cost the Department dearly in public confidence and good will—the operation that was intended to wipe out the gypsy moth for ever—had in reality accomplished nothing at all.

Meanwhile, the Department's Plant Pest Control men had temporarily forgotten gypsy moths, for they had been busy launching an even more ambitious program in the South. The word "eradication" still came easily from the Department's mimeograph machines; this time the press releases were promising the eradication of the fire ant.

The fire ant, an insect named for its fiery sting, seems to have entered the United States from South America by way of the port of Mobile, Alabama, where it was discovered shortly after the end of the First World War. By 1928 it had spread into the suburbs of Mobile and thereafter continued an invasion that has now carried it into most of the southern states.

During most of the forty-odd years since its arrival in the United States the fire ant seems to have attracted little attention. The states where it was most abundant considered it a nuisance, chiefly because it builds large nests or mounds a foot or more high. These may hamper the operation of farm machinery. But only two states listed it among their 20 most important insect pests, and these placed it near the bottom of the list. No official or private concern seems to have been felt about the fire ant as a menace to crops or livestock.

With the development of chemicals of broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude toward the fire ant. In 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of birds, livestock, and man. A mighty campaign was announced, in which the federal government in cooperation with the afflicted states would ultimately treat some 20,000,000 acres in nine southern states.

"United States pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the increasing numbers of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture," cheerfully reported one trade journal in 1958, as the fire ant program got under way.

Never has any pesticide program been so thoroughly and deservedly damned by practically everyone except the beneficiaries of this "sales bonanza." It is an outstanding example of an ill-conceived, badly executed, and thoroughly detrimental experiment in the mass control of insects, an experiment so expensive in dollars, in destruction of animal life, and in loss of public confidence in the Agriculture Department that it is incomprehensible that any funds should still be devoted to it.

Congressional support of the project was initially won by representations that were later discredited. The fire ant was pictured as a serious threat to southern agriculture through destruction of crops and to wildlife because of attacks on the young of ground-nesting birds. Its sting was said to make it a serious menace to human health.

Just how sound were these claims? The statements made by Department witnesses seeking appropriations were not in accord with those contained in key publications of the Agriculture Department. The 1957 bulletin
Insecticide Recommendations ... for the Control of Insects Attacking Crops and Livestock
did not so much as mention the fire ant—an extraordinary omission if the Department believes its own propaganda. Moreover, its encyclopedic
Yearbook
for 1952, which was devoted to insects, contained only one short paragraph on the fire ant out of its half-million words of text.

Against the Department's undocumented claim that the fire ant destroys crops and attacks livestock is the careful study of the Agricultural Experiment Station in the state that has had the most intimate experience with this insect, Alabama. According to Alabama scientists, "damage to plants in general is rare." Dr. F. S. Arant, an entomologist at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute and in 1961 president of the Entomological Society of America, states that his department "has not received a single report of damage to plants by ants in the past five years ... No damage to livestock has been observed." These men, who have actually observed the ants in the field and in the laboratory, say that the fire ants feed chiefly on a variety of other insects, many of them considered harmful to man's interests. Fire ants have been observed picking larvae of the boll weevil off cotton. Their mound-building activities serve a useful purpose in aerating and draining the soil. The Alabama studies have been substantiated by investigations at the Mississippi State University, and are far more impressive than the Agriculture Department's evidence, apparently based either on conversations with farmers,
who may easily mistake one ant for another, or on old research. Some entomologists believe that the ant's food habits have changed as it has become more abundant, so that observations made several decades ago have little value now.

The claim that the ant is a menace to health and life also bears considerable modification. The Agriculture Department sponsored a propaganda movie (to gain support for its program) in which horror scenes were built around the fire ant's sting. Admittedly this is painful and one is well advised to avoid being stung, just as one ordinarily avoids the sting of wasp or bee. Severe reactions may occasionally occur in sensitive individuals, and medical literature records one death possibly, though not definitely, attributable to fire ant venom. In contrast to this, the Office of Vital Statistics records 33 deaths in 1959 alone from the sting of bees and wasps. Yet no one seems to have proposed "eradicating" these insects. Again, local evidence is most convincing. Although the fire ant has inhabited Alabama for 40 years and is most heavily concentrated there, the Alabama State Health Officer declares that "there has never been recorded in Alabama a human death resulting from the bites of imported fire ants," and considers the medical cases resulting from the bites of fire ants "incidental." Ant mounds on lawns or playgrounds may create a situation where children are likely to be stung, but this is hardly an excuse for drenching millions of acres with poisons. These situations can easily be handled by individual treatment of the mounds.

Damage to game birds was also alleged, without supporting evidence. Certainly a man well qualified to speak on this issue is the leader of the Wildlife Research Unit at Auburn, Alabama, Dr. Maurice F. Baker, who has had many years' experience in the area. But Dr. Baker's opinion is directly opposite to the claims of the Agriculture Department. He declares: "In south Alabama and northwest Florida we are able to have excellent hunting and bobwhite populations coexistent with heavy populations of the imported fire ant ... in the almost 40 years that south Alabama has had the fire ant, game populations have shown a steady and very substantial increase. Certainly, if the imported fire ant were a serious menace to wildlife, these conditions could not exist."

What would happen to wildlife as a result of the insecticide used against the ants was another matter. The chemicals to be used were dieldrin and heptachlor, both relatively new. There was little experience of field use for either, and no one knew what their effects would be on wild birds, fishes, or mammals when applied on a massive scale. It was known, however, that both poisons were many times more toxic than DDT, which had been used by that time for approximately a decade, and had killed some birds and many fish even at a rate of 1 pound per acre. And the dosage of dieldrin and heptachlor was heavier—2 pounds to the acre under most conditions, or 3 pounds of dieldrin if the white-fringed beetle was also to be controlled. In terms of their effects on birds, the prescribed use of heptachlor would be equivalent to 20 pounds of DDT to the acre, that of dieldrin to 120 pounds!

Urgent protests were made by most of the state conservation departments, by national conservation agencies, and by ecologists and even by some entomologists, calling upon the then Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Benson, to delay the program at least until some research had been done to determine the effects of heptachlor and dieldrin on wild and domestic animals and to find the minimum amount that would control the ants. The protests were ignored and the program was launched in 1958. A million acres were treated the first year. It was clear that any research would be in the nature of a post mortem.

As the program continued, facts began to accumulate from studies made by biologists of state and federal wildlife agencies and several universities. The studies revealed losses running all the way up to complete destruction of wildlife on some of the treated areas. Poultry, livestock, and pets were also killed. The Agriculture Department brushed away all evidence of damage as exaggerated and misleading.

The facts, however, continue to accumulate. In Hardin County, Texas, for example, opossums, armadillos, and an abundant raccoon population virtually disappeared after the chemical was laid down. Even the second autumn after treatment these animals were scarce. The few raccoons then found in the area carried residues of the chemical in their tissues.

Dead birds found in the treated areas had absorbed or swallowed the poisons used against the fire ants, a fact clearly shown by chemical analysis of their tissues. (The only bird surviving in any numbers was the house sparrow, which in other areas too has given some evidence that it may be relatively immune.) On a tract in Alabama treated in 1959 half of the birds were killed. Species that live on the ground or frequent low vegetation suffered 100 per cent mortality. Even a year after treatment, a spring die-off of songbirds occurred and much good nesting territory lay silent and unoccupied. In Texas, dead blackbirds, dickcissels, and meadowlarks were found at the nests, and many nests were deserted. When specimens of dead birds from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida were sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service for analysis, more than 90 per cent were found to contain residues of dieldrin or a form of heptachlor, in amounts up to 38 parts per million.

Woodcocks, which winter in Louisiana but breed in the North, now carry the taint of the fire ant poisons in their bodies. The source of this contamination is clear. Woodcocks feed heavily on earthworms, which they probe for with their long bills. Surviving worms in Louisiana were found to have as much as 20 parts per million of heptachlor in their tissues 6 to 10 months after treatment of the area. A year later they had up to 10 parts per million. The consequences of the sublethal poisoning of the woodcock are now seen in a marked decline in the proportion of young birds to adults, first observed in the season after fire ant treatments began.

Some of the most upsetting news for southern sportsmen concerned the bobwhite quail. This bird, a ground nester and forager, was all but eliminated on treated areas. In Alabama, for example, biologists of the Alabama Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit conducted a preliminary census of the quail population in a 3600-acre area that was scheduled for treatment. Thirteen resident coveys—121 quail—ranged over the area. Two weeks after treatment only dead quail could be found. All specimens sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service for analysis were found to contain insecticides in amounts sufficient to cause their death. The Alabama findings were duplicated in Texas, where a 2500-acre area treated with heptachlor lost all of its quail. Along with the quail went 90 per cent of the songbirds. Again, analysis revealed the presence of heptachlor in the tissues of dead birds.