ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 



. _^ _.* . _ ._ 



PHILADELPHIA, PA., OCTOBER, 1918. 



No Simple Life for Insects. 



The more we learn of life, the greater do its complexities 

 reveal themselves. It is doubtful whether we can assert of 

 any organism that leads the "simple life." This is just as 

 true of insects as of any other creatures. The discoveries of 

 recent years as to the parts which insects play in transmitting 

 causative agents of disease are but a beginning of that fund 

 of biologic and ecologic knowledge which the next generation 

 of entomologists, pathologists, bacteriologists, protozoologists 

 arid hygienists will possess. Confirmation of this view is fur- 

 nished by observations published during the past few months, 

 as where Turner has emphasized the carriage by Heteroptera 

 and Homoptera of specific plant maladies, such as pecan 

 kernel spot by the green soldier bug, Nesara viridnla, and the 

 recent announcements from both English and American 

 sources of the connection of trench fever with human lice. 

 The famous example, cited by Darwin in the third chapter of 

 The Origin of Species, "showing how plants and animals, 

 remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of 

 complex relations," will, names changed, ultimately be true 

 for many more insects than the humble bees of which it was 



first employed. 



i 



Notes and Ne\vs. 



ENTOMOLOGICAL GLEANINGS FROM ALL QUARTERS 

 OF THE GLOBE. 



Emergency Entomological Service. 



Owing to limited space in our pages and to the great variety of topics 

 mentioned in Nos. 13 and 14 of the Reports of this Service of the U. S. 

 Department of Agriculture, for July i and August i, 1918, respectively, 

 we give here a very brief notice of their most important contents only. 

 (Compare the NEWS for July, 1918, pages 271-3.) 



Further data on Climatic Effects on Insects are that white grubs 

 are undoubtedly less abundant in parts of Indiana than in the Fall of 

 1917, a result ascribed to later appearance of the imagos in 1917, owm- 

 to cool weather, with consequently younger and less resistant grubs 

 to meet the sudden freeze of last October. The cold of the winter of 

 1917-18 apparently killed only those joint worms which were in the 

 upstanding stubble, not those in stubble lying in or near the ground. 



From Massachusetts comes the statement: "Thus far fAug. i] 

 this has been emphatically a Plant Louse Year," and similar ex- 

 periences are reported as far south as Maryland, excessive drought 

 intensifying the injury from aphids on many vegetables. 



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