at Miami may have launched the invasion of the Mediterranean fruit fly 
into the United States in 1956. During April of that year, a Miami home- 
owner discovered Medflies infesting his backyard grapefruit trees, The 
alarm, ‘‘The Medfly is coming!’’ was frightening news for the entire 
South, because this Old World insect can wreck citrus and 100 other 
southern crops. Before the invasion could be halted, the flies spread 
damage through the Florida citrus belt. Wiping out every living Medfly in 
Florida required a Federal-State campaign that took a year and a half and 
cost more than $10 million--to safeguard southern fruit and vegetable 
crops worth $400 million a year, 
From contact with the public, U.S. officials believe that people far 
more often fail to do their part in pest exclusion because they do not 
understand their responsibilities or because of thoughtlessness than from 
deliberate intent to foil the law. An informed public is one approach to 
tightening defense against costly pest invasions, 
THE MASSIVE POWER OF SMALL PESTS 
Why People Must Fight Pests 
The world's 2.8 billion people are far outnumbered and outweighed by 
agricultural pests. Insect populations are so tremendous that numbers 
are beyond meaning. The descendants of one female aphid, if all lived, 
would amount to 1,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 by the end of the 
season, 
Kinds of insects on earth may exceed a million, Of these, the United 
States has about 85,000 known kinds and considers 10,000 as undesirables 
and several hundred as destructive enough to agriculture to be of major 
importance, 
Human beings have always had to struggle against pests. Insects were 
on earth millions of years before man, Insects have never taken over the 
earth because natural foes tend to keep some balance among the forms of 
life in an area, The old jingle on insects puts it neatly: 
‘‘Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite 'em; 
Little bugs have littler bugs, and so ad infinitum."’ 
But pests, given a chance, break out in plague force. The Bible has made 
famous one famine caused by locusts that flew so thick in Egypt that they 
darkened the land and devoured crops sothat ‘‘not a green thing remained,"’ 
Pests on the rampage have starved out great numbers of people so often 
in history that pests are thought of when the world's worst fears are 
mentioned, Insects and diseases that attack animals, plants, and man rode 
with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and 
death, 
Modern times have brought two entirely new conditions into the 
struggle of man against pests. 
