Cotton Boll-Weevil
an insect pest of the southwest. Cotton has many enemies. Some of these foes are diseases of fungous, that is to say, of plant origin. Wilt, soreshin, and rootknot beset the roots and stems. Leaf-spot, leaf-blight, and mildew attack the foliage. The bolls, with their precious contents of white fiber, are subject to rot and shedding. Animal foes are even more numerous. There are red spiders, plant lice, cutworms and caterpillars, webworms, and borers. A blue-green caterpillar, marked with black spots and stripes, known as the cotton-worm, is produced from the eggs of a brown moth. A similar caterpillar, known as the cotton boll-worm, is troublesome in gardens and cornfields, as well as in the cotton field.
The chief pest of the cotton grower, however, is the cotton boll-weevil, which is said in the year 1907 to have destroyed in Texas alone no less than 1,000,000 bales of cotton, worth $50,000,000 or $60,000,000. There are 11,000 beetles in the United States, but the home of this particular one is supposed to be Central America. The eggs of this weevil came to the United States, it is thought, in 1902, having crossed the Rio Grande into Texas in Mexican cotton brought to Brownsville to be ginned. The pest has spread northward and eastward, advancing like the Colorado potato beetle, at the rate of about forty-five miles a year, and is now troublesome in Oklahoma and in Mississippi. The beetle deposits its eggs in the square, or young blossom of the cotton plant. Instead of blooming and producing seed, with the white fibers so prized in commerce, the square wilts and falls off.
This Mexican weevil is a most serious menace to the cotton district. The United States Department of Agriculture has detailed specialists to fight it. Researches in Guatemala reveal the presence of a large red ant that makes a business of eating the weevils alive. In Central America these ants are numerous enough to prevent the spread of the insect. Colonies of ants were transported to Texas and began the work of devouring weevils, but our climate seems to be too dry for the ants. They have not prospered. Hopes of success from their aid have faded, though it is just possible that in the moister parts of the cotton belt, along the Mississippi and eastward, in climatic conditions more like those of Central America, the Guatemalan ant may prove helpful.
The cotton boll-weevil does not stand the American winter well. Comparatively few individuals live over. Several generations live and die during the same summer. It is not until late in the same year that the weevils are sufficient in number to master a cotton crop. Scientists are devoting themselves at the present time to the task of breeding an early cotton--a cotton that will mature in about 100 days, and be ready to gather before the weevil army has massed in the fields.
Those who are studying the situation have hopes, also, that aid may come from a native Texan fly. The flies are small creatures. They have been accustomed to lay their eggs in the larvae of a weevil that infests strawberry beds; but of late, they have taken a notion to plunge their eggs into the cotton-boll weevil. In some localities, they appear to have reduced the cotton-boll pest very remarkably. It is just possible that this new ally may prove as valuable in our cotton field as has the ant in Central America.
In unusually dry seasons the cotton boll-weevil suffers from the drouth. Like its fellow countryman, the Guatemalan ant, it is found at these times lying on the ground shriveled up and dead.
