BROMELIAD MALARIA — SMITH 395 



them at suitable intervals to provide room for pumping stations. 

 Tanks were made by assembling movable sections and lining them 

 with canvas (pi. 2, fig. 1). Water was pumped into the tanks from 

 the nearest watercourse and copper-sulfate powder added. The pumps 

 were then reversed to spray the surrounding forest (pi. 2, fig. 2). 



The value of herbicide control in Santa Catarina to date has not 

 been so great as that of the other methods, but if it can be improved 

 it promises to have certain advantages. It saves the trees, since only 

 the epiphytes are killed, and thus it has a great economic advantage 

 over deforestation. Owing to the slow recovery of the bromeliads, 

 herbicide does not need to be applied oftener than every 5 years 

 where DDT needs yearly application. 



CONTINUATION OF CONTROL AND RESEARCH 



At present Santa Catarina is freer from malaria than at any 

 time in recent history. However, the people of the Servico Nacional 

 de Malaria realize that what they have achieved is control and not 

 eradication. As Rachou has pointed out (1951), eradication is pos- 

 sible only when the campaign can be carried out on all sides to 

 strong natural barriers such as the shores of an island. On the other 

 hand control, once established, can be made more and more efficient 

 by continued research. 



With this idea in mind, Pinotti set up a malaria research labora- 

 tory in Brusque in 1949 under the ecologist Henrique P. Veloso. The 

 laboratory was equipped to study bromeliad malaria from all possible 

 angles. Field crews have made a succession of surveys of the brome- 

 liad population of the forests and of the mosquito population of the 

 bromeliads. A card has been made out for each bromeliad listing 20 

 items of information, including the species of tree on which it grew, 

 the species of the bromeliad, its height from the ground, the amount 

 and temperature of the water in its tank, and the number and species 

 of mosquito larvae in the water. To date 120,000 individual brome- 

 liads from 200 localities have been studied and their importance as 

 mosquito breeders evaluated (Veloso, in press), with the aim of 

 making the attack more selective, more efficient, and consequently less 

 expensive. 



With the help of Padre Raulino Reitz, director of the Herbario 

 Barbosa Rodrigues, a thorough systematic and ecological study of 

 the bromeliads has been made and an illustrated monograph of all 

 the Santa Catarina species has been prepared (Reitz, in preparation). 

 1 have contributed keys for the identification of such material (Smith, 

 1950) until more detailed works are ready, and have correlated all 

 the Santa Catarina collections with those already in the Smithsonian 



