by Brian Griffith.
Among the many heroic movies I watched as a youth, some of the worst concerned combat with deadly insects. In the film Them (1954), ants exposed to radiation in New Mexico grew into murdering giants that had to be exterminated by Air Force bombings with poison gas. Then there was The Naked Jungle, where Charlton Heston battled a raging army of marabunta ants that consumed every sentient being before them. In 1957 came The Deadly Mantis and The Beginning of the End, where flesh-eating locusts terrorized America’s Bible Belt. Later came Empire of the Ants (1977), in which an unscrupulous Florida real estate dealer tricked customers into buying homes in an area dominated by huge killer ants. In Starship Troopers (1997), the enemy insects were aliens seeking to conquer our universe. As in the case of farmers facing hordes of all-consuming locusts, it seemed like a clear choice: them or us.
During this era of film history, fire ants from Latin America were invading the southern USA, relentlessly expanding their hunting grounds. The insect invaders showed stoic determination, somewhat like the Myrmidons, who the ancient Greek god Zeus transformed from ants into fighting men. These Myrmidons followed the dictates of their commanders regardless of risk or moral consideration, acting as blindly obedient fighting machines. As the Roman poet Ovid described them,
True to their origin, you have seen their bodies,
and they still have their customary talents,
industry, thrift, endurance; they are eager
for gain, and never easily relinquish
what they have won.
(Moffett)
Back in South America where these ants came from, the Kayapo people claimed that the ants helped control other bugs that ate the manioc crops. But as the fire ants spread northward, publicists from pesticide companies and government agencies raised an alarm. In the “all out” war on invader ants, US state governments got matching federal funds for spraying 22 million acres with the DDT-related chemicals heptachlor and dieldrin. The total cost to taxpayers was around 7 billion dollars. At some point in this battle, however, cotton farmers noticed that the supposedly enemy ants ate crop-destroying boll weevils. And during the spraying campaign, so many people reported large-scale deaths of animals and birds, that the Food and Drug Administration advised banning the use of heptachlor on food crops (Lauck; Quinn; Souder).
In the post-WWII era, the use of chemical weapons on animals grew common, and the first city-wide spraying of the later-banned pesticide aldrin happened in Detroit in 1959. This chemical bombing campaign came in response to an invasion by the Japanese beetle, which had appeared as a lawn-grass pest during the previous 30 years. The insect was actually quite rare, and several Detroit-area naturalists said they hadn’t really seen one. But a general alarm over this bug prompted orders to spray the city with a variant of DDT, which killed masses of birds and reportedly many pets. In retrospect, some observers suspected that this warlike reaction to a beetle in the grass may have been largely due to its name. During WWII, Life magazine had run an article on the bug, explaining that “Japanese beetles, unlike the Japanese, are without guile. There are, however, many parallels between the two. Both are small but very numerous and prolific, as well as voracious, greedy, and devouring” (Steinberg). The wartime comic book Leatherneck portrayed a discovery of deadly insects called Louseous Japanicus, which were bugs with slanty eyes and buck teeth. The comic advised that “before a complete cure may be affected, the origin of the [insect] plague, the breeding grounds around the Tokyo area, must be completely annihilated” (Burleigh). In short, if it was “Japaneseˮ in post-war America, then it seemed to require aerial bombardment (Flannery).
Then there were the killer bees, who emerged from the Brazilian laboratory of Professor Warren E. Kerr, as he sought to breed honeybees that would flourish in Brazil’s tropical climate. Starting in 1956, Kerr crossed European bees with the more tropical and disease-resistant African bees. African bees came from landscapes where food was scarcer than in Europe, and more predators preyed on their hives. These bees were generally more aggressive in seeking and defending their food. In 1957, some of the hybrid bees escaped from Kerr’s laboratory. Then, after a US-supported military coup overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, Kerr was thrown in jail for speaking out against the generals. His accusers claimed he had unleashed “killer beesˮ in a communistic act of spite against his nation. As the bees ranged northward toward the USA, rumors spread of a coming African killer catastrophe, leading to the 1978 movie The Swarm, which was widely deemed the worst disaster movie ever made. The whole fear factor seemed amusing to Africans, who didn’t realize their bees were so horrific.
A lot of these insect invasions involve bugs moving northward as the climate warms. For example, bark beetles have expanded into the far north, killing vast numbers of trees across Alaska and the Canadian north, where the winter cold used to keep them back. So far, the response of government and corporate foresters has been basically military. Chemical weapons proved ineffective, as the beetles burrow deep into the trees, and externally applied poisons mostly kill all the other small creatures. Therefore, the main weapons used were controlled burns and massive clear cuts, to deny the beetles wood to eat. In many cases, the local people felt that these control operations were far more destructive than the bugs. Beetle expert Stephen Wood explained that bark beetles decompose weaker trees and open the way to more vigorous growth in aging forests. But, he added, the short-term interests of forestry corporations have reclassified this beetle from a “beneficial to a destructive element.” Therefore, in suppressing the cyclical outbreaks of bark beetles in Oregon’s forests, a federal entomologist reported to headquarters, “The control forces have given the enemy repeated setbacks, but until recently the beetles on the southern front have had their forces strengthened by reinforcements from the north … The ultimate victory is now in sight” (Nikiforuk).
Notes:
Burleigh, Michael (2011) Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II. HarperCollins, New York, p. 386.
Flannery, Tim (2010) Here On Earth. HarperCollins, Toronto, pp. 164–165.
Lauck, Joanne Elizabeth (2002) The Voice of the Infinite in the Small. Shambhala, Boston, p. 96.
Moffett, Mark W. (2010) Adventures Among the Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions. U. of California Press, Berkeley, p. 223.
Nikiforuk, Andrew (2011) Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug are Killing North America’s Great Forests. GreyStone Books, Vancouver, p. 90, 33.
Quinn, John R. (1994) Wildlife Survivors: The Flora and Fauna of Tomorrow, TAB Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, p. 53.
Souder, William (2012) On a Further Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. Crown Publishers, New York, pp. 272–273.
Steinberg, Ted (2002) Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. Kindle edition. Oxford University Press, New York, locs. 4327–37.
[an excerpt from the upcoming ANIMAL WARS, by Brian Griffith, Exterminating Angel Press Spring 2015]