Inhaltsangabe
Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a coterie of fire ants came ashore from South American ships docked in Mobile, Alabama. Fanning out across the region, the fire ants invaded the South, damaging crops, harassing game animals, and hindering harvesting methods. Responding to a collective call from southerners to eliminate these invasive pests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed a campaign that not only failed to eradicate the fire ants but left a wake of dead wildlife, sickened cattle, and public protest.
With political intrigue, environmental tragedy, and such figures as Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson, The Fire Ant Wars is a grippingly perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices. Tracing the political and scientific eradication campaigns, Joshua Buhs's bracing study uses the saga as a means to consider twentieth-century American concepts of nature and environmental stewardship. In telling the story, Buhs explores how human concepts of nature evolve and how these ideas affect the natural and social worlds.
Spotlighting a particular issue to discuss larger questions of science, public perceptions, and public policy—from pre-environmental awareness to the activist years of the early environmental movement—The Fire Ant Wars will appeal to historians of science, environmentalists, and biologists alike.
With political intrigue, environmental tragedy, and such figures as Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson, The Fire Ant Wars is a grippingly perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices. Tracing the political and scientific eradication campaigns, Joshua Buhs's bracing study uses the saga as a means to consider twentieth-century American concepts of nature and environmental stewardship. In telling the story, Buhs explores how human concepts of nature evolve and how these ideas affect the natural and social worlds.
Spotlighting a particular issue to discuss larger questions of science, public perceptions, and public policy—from pre-environmental awareness to the activist years of the early environmental movement—The Fire Ant Wars will appeal to historians of science, environmentalists, and biologists alike.
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A scholar of the overlap of politics, biology, and ecology in twentieth-century America, Joshua Blu Buhs has written articles that have appeared in Isis, Environmental History, The World of Genetics, and Journal of the History of Biology.
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The Fire Ant Wars
NATURE, SCIENCE, AND PUBLIC POLICY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICABy Joshua Blu BuhsThe University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2004 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-07981-3
Contents
Acknowledgments......................................................................1Introduction.........................................................................9Chapter One: From South America to the American South, 1900-1950.....................39Chapter Two: Grins a Prohibitive Fracture, 1945-1957.................................81Chapter Three: Fire Ants, from Savage to Invincible, 1957-1972.......................125Chapter Four: The Fire Ant Wars, 1958-1983...........................................171Chapter Five: The Practice of Nature, 1978-2000......................................199References...........................................................................209Index
Chapter One
From South America to the American South, 1900-1950
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
William Ernest Henley, "Invictus"
The red imported fire ant, noted journalist Charles Haddad in 1990, was not only "a part of the South's ecosystem but" was "embedded in folklore as well." And not just folklore: the ant was a part of southern culture. By the end of the twentieth century the insect occupied about 300 million acres in North America, from Florida to California and as far north as Virginia, an entrenched and ubiquitous denizen of the Sun Belt. Musicians wrote songs about the insect, sports teams used it as a mascot, and the town of Marshal, Texas dedicated an annual festival to it. The ant figured in advertisements, political speeches, and novels. "The fire ant is a swarming, biting nasty little critter whose legend is to flatlands what bigfoot is to the mountains," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution proclaimed in 1986. But this was not always the case. The ant evolved in South America and only came to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. How did the insect reach North America? And how did it spread and come to dominate the South?
The fire ant's history is a tale of nature, humans, and their interactions. Evolving on a South American floodplain, the fire ant became an adept tramp, able to move easily and exploit open, disturbed habitats. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shipping routes tethered its homeland to world markets. Accidentally loaded aboard boats with South American cargo, Solenopsis invicta found itself in Mobile, Alabama, subsequently spreading from the port city across American South. The fire ant's spread, I argue, resulted from the interaction between the insect's biology and human activities. When the imported fire ant reached the United States, American citizens were busily recasting the South's economy and ecology, creating new avenues of transport as well as new open and disturbed areas. The ant traveled along these new corridors and exploited the new habitats. Natural history and human history intertwined to produce the imported fire ant's explosion.
Natural History of the Imported Fire Ants
The imported fire ant belongs to the genus Solenopsis, a group of some two hundred species of ants; only a handful of these are fire ants, about twenty, the uncertainty reflecting the limited knowledge we have of some species. The genus originated in tropical South America around 65 million years ago, as the dinosaurs made their last stand and the Andean orogeny proceeded along the continent's western spine. According to the geological record, Solenopsis underwent an adaptive radiation during the Miocene, before the first Homo sapiens walked across the African savannah. A variety of forms evolved. Some Solenopsis eat seeds; some parasitize other ants. Some live along the littoral, some in treetops, some in subterranean tunnels. Those ants that came to be known as "fire ants" developed a potent sting that gave the group its common name. The humorist Dave Barry remembered that the first time he was stung by a fire ant he "leaped up and danced wildly around, brushing uselessly at my hand, which felt as though I had stuck it in a toaster oven set on 'pizza.'" But while the insects developed different lifestyles, changes in their appearance did not always keep pace. As a group, the ants are rather nondescript, and many species look alike, even to experts. The ant biologist William Steel Creighton wrote that when studying the insects' taxonomy, "[o]ne has the unpleasant feeling that he is entering a battle-field strewn with unexploded missiles and that there is a strong probability that one of these taxonomic duds may, through tampering, bring the investigator to grief."
This confusion clouds the early history of the imported fire ant invasion. For many years, the name "imported fire ant" covered two species, Solenopsis richteri and Solenopsis invicta, both of which journeyed from South America to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. Solenopsis richteri is a dark brown or black species, with a yellow stripe across its gaster. Solenopsis invicta lacks the stripe of its congener and is red, although sometimes black or brown, too. The two species inhabit different parts of the world's largest wetland, an expanse of marshy land that follows the Ro Paraguay through Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina to its confluence with the Ro Paraa-where the drainage is known as the Ro de la Plata-and, ultimately, to the Atlantic Ocean. The black imported fire ant lives at the southern edge of this riverine system, often in seasonally waterlogged grasslands; it also lives along roadsides in Buenos Aires and amid the grasslands of the drier Argentine pampas. The range of the red imported fire ant runs north from Buenos Aires, following the Paraguay and Paraa into Brazil. The ant also survives on the harsh plains of the Chaco. Solenopsis invicta is the insect now known as the "imported fire ant," the one that has caused most of the problems and has provoked both the South's loathing and pride.
The rivers and their tributaries set the pulse for the ants' South American home. During the dry season, from April to October, rivers run weakly and grasses clog the riverbeds, growing thick in the rich silt deposited by the rivers in years past. When the rains come, and the waters tumble from the Brazilian plateau to the north and the Andes to the west, the tangle of flora forces the rivers to cut new channels. These fill with silt and eventually overflow, flooding the countryside for months. The rivers' vagrancy has created a wealth of habitats and the area supports a rich array of plant life. In 1927 one geographer noted, "The most striking feature in the natural vegetation is its lack of uniformity." 10 Palms stand in swamps; tall grasses dominate savannah-like stretches, while shorter grasses survive on areas that have been more recently covered with water. In parts of the Chaco, quebracho trees grow into forests.
Solenopsis invicta evolved to take advantage of the open and disturbed habitats left in the wake of floods. The entomologist Walter Tschinkel compared the insect to a weed. The ant, Tschinkel said, breeds rapidly, spreads easily, and competes fiercely. A single red queen gives birth to a colony of 230,000 in about three years and produces about 4,000 to 6,000...
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