Insects of the Pacific Coast 



The insects of the Pacific are, however, more 

 conspicuous by the kinds familiarly known all 

 over our continent than by the sorts peculiar to the 

 region. In fact, what with the same old house- 

 flies and blue-bottles, mosquitoes and fleas, cock- 

 roaches and bedbugs, and other familiar close com- 

 panions of men, the insect fauna of a Pacific island 

 or of the Pacific Coast of America is likely to be 

 disappointingly familiar and familiarly troublesome. 



But this familiar character of the first seen and 

 most often seen insects of the Pacific points an im- 

 portant moral to the student of insect distribution 

 and of insect troubles. It is the moral of man's per- 

 sonal aid in the wide dissemination of insect pests. 

 Wherever he goes by wagon, train or ship, he car- 

 ries his pests with him, colonizes them wherever he 

 settles, and supports them in their new homes by 

 his own presence and the presence of his domesti- 

 cated animals, and his quickly planted grains and 

 vegetables, fruits and flowers. 



So the casually inquisitive visitor to Pacific lands 

 will find himself irritated by the same kind of fleas, 

 mosquitoes, buzzy flies ana biting flies, nocturnal 

 bed-fellows, same old Croton bugs and black beetles 

 and the rest that he knows in the East and Middle 

 West. 



They have all come to California and Oregon and 

 Washington, and gone on to the Hawaiian and Sa- 

 moan and Philippine islands, just as many of them 

 came from Asia to Europe and Europe to the Atlantic 

 and went on to the Mississippi Valley in earlier years. 

 And this emigration and immigration by the side and 

 with the aid of man accounts for a considerable, 

 and from the economic point of view, a very im- 

 portant part of the Pacific insect fauna. For most 

 of the worst insect pests of California and the rest 

 of the Pacific Coast are imported and comparatively 

 recently imported species. 



The most important single group of insects to the 

 citrus and deciduous fruit growers of California are 

 the scale insects (Coccidae), small degenerate, spe- 

 cialized, wax-covered and protected sap-sucking 

 creatures, of hardly the seeming of an insect at all. 

 The San Jose scale, the cottony-cushion scale, the 

 black scale, the soft brown scale, the red orange 

 scale, and all the rest of the scaly crew are ever 

 threatening clouds on the fruit power's horizon. 

 And he spends annually much time, energy and 

 money in fighting back the swiftly multiplying 

 hordes of these pests. 



Now practically all of them are natives of other 

 lands; they are man-aided immigrants into Cali- 



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