INSECTS OF THE PACIFIC 267 



scale pest had got carried to America without its vedalia enemy, and, 

 accordingly, found California in truth the promised land. Now what 

 more common-sensible than deliberately to import and colonize vedalia 

 in the California orange and lemon orchards ? Which was, accordingly, 

 done, and done easily and successfully, so that here, as in Australia, 

 vedalia keeps the cottony-cushion scale insect within practically harm- 

 less bounds. 



ISTaturally such a success has led to many other attempts in many 

 other similar cases. Perhaps no other success has been so marked as 

 the now classic first one, but much other success there has been, both 

 on the Pacific coast and on Pacific islands, notably Hawaii, and also in 

 the eastern states. The great fight against the imported foliage and 

 forest tree pests of New England, the direful gipsy and brown-tail 

 moths, is resolving itself more and more into a search for and colonizing 

 of their natural parasites in Europe and Japan. 



Another type of good bug brought to the Pacific coast by deliberate 

 importation and carefully nursed to an effective colonization is the curi- 

 ous little fig- wasp, Blastopliaga, by whose means the " caprification,'" 

 i. e., pollination, of figs depends, on which depends, in turn, the full 

 size, sweetness and the nutty fiavor of the best commercial figs. The fig 

 is a hollow but fleshy receptacle with many minute flowers inside. The 

 Blastopliaga eggs are laid in the ovules of these flowers, and there the 

 tiny grub (larva) lives and feeds and changes finally into a little 

 chrysalid, and then adult. The adult male Blastopliaga is a curious de- 

 formed wingless creature, and remains in the fig of its birth until it 

 dies. But the female is a winged active insect that leaves its natal and 

 cradle fig and flies to others to lay its eggs. Curiously, it can find 

 suitable egg-laying places only in the wild or so-called capri figs and so 

 does not leave eggs in the cultivated figs, but in walking about over their 

 flowers it dusts them with pollen brought from the fig last visited, and 

 thus produces the necessary cross-pollination. As the Blastopliaga lays 

 no eggs in the domestic figs, it is necessary to keep a few wild fig-trees 

 growing in or near the orchard. 



But not all the Pacific coast insects are excessively bad bugs or 

 excessively good ones. Some call for attention because they are just 

 beautiful, or singular, or of unusual habit or habitat. And these are 

 likely to seize the interest of most of us more certainly than the pests. 

 For, after all, our interest in nature is not primarily one of dollars and 

 cents. It is one of curiosity and of " wanting to know." 



A matter that lends California's fauna and flora a special interest to 

 naturalists is the peculiar biogeographic situation of the state. Biolog- 

 ically, California is essentially a large island, shut off by barriers of 

 actual water on one side and by hot desert and high cold mountain 

 ranges on the other, with the ends also nearly similarly barred by desert 



