Save the kudzu!
You know kudzu: that tenacious green creeping vine that poses a menace to trees, outbuildings, and the slow-moving elderly because of its incredible rate of growth and the fact that it's harder to kill than that guy in the hockey mask in the "Friday the 13th" movies. Kudzu is as much a part of the Southern landscape as grits, Goody's Headache Powders, and Moon Pies. Well now, it seems some Yankee scientist is trying to come up with a way to wipe out the official weed of the deep South. Here's the plan:
There's apparently this caterpillar called the soybean looper. Said critter, true to its name, likes to live on soybeans, but also has a taste for kudzu. This bug is also the primary food for a type of wasp that lays its eggs in the caterpillar's body, sort of like those nasty bug villains in the movie "Alien". When the eggs hatch and the little parasites start to grow inside the caterpillar, the caterpillar gets REAL hungry and starts wolfing down kudzu faster than Drew Carey at a beer-drinking contest. Eventually, the caterpillar meets a tragic end as the baby wasps consume him from inside, leaving-I'm quoting from the story here- "a husk of wasp larva behind".
Charming. Leave it to the boys from NC State to come up with something like this.
I have a bad feeling about this. For one thing, I kind of LIKE kudzu. If you're bored, you can amuse yourself by finding shapes in it, sort of like looking for shapes in the clouds. And if you have an old abandoned building or some junked cars on your property, kudzu will come and cover up those eyesores with a nice green blanket before the zoning commission can get there. But, more importantly, this is the type of well-meaning mucking about with nature that led us to this problem in the first place. See, the Federal Government originally imported kudzu from Japan as an erosion control measure way back in 1932. With no natural enemies the stuff took off like-well, like kudzu, and pretty soon, it was everywhere. (Doesn't it just figure that the Feds would be involved in there somewhere? To screw something up on this scale, you've got to have the Federal Government.)
Let's think about this for a moment. The kudzu gets eaten, then the kudzu eating caterpillar gets eaten, leaving behind...a whole truckload of wasps. Now, which would you rather have: a plague of kudzu or a plague of wasps, even supposedly stingless ones?
Someone has not thought this thing through.
In contrast, let's look at the way the state of Louisiana is trying to deal with its nutria problem. The nutria is a kind of big, ugly ratlike critter with orange teeth that lives in the bayous (Bayou is Louisianian for swamp). They're native to South America, but the guy who invented Tabasco sauce (this is true) imported a bunch of them to raise for fur. Unfortunately, the experiment failed when the bottom fell out of the market for swamp-rat fur. Go figure. One night, during a hurricane, the nutria got loose and vanished into the bayous. Everyone thought they'd all get eaten by gators, and good riddance. But the nutria, being hardy little rodents, multiplied like special prosecutors, although the nutria are a lot cuter. Pretty soon, they were eating all the vegetation in sight and were hollering for dessert. Louisiana tried trapping, they tried poison, they tried everything they could think of, to no avail. Finally, they came up with a uniquely Louisianian response: they decided to eat them. (Remember, these are the people who gave us crawfish gumbo. These people could make a meal out of asphalt fragments and dead leaves and have you scraping the bowl and coming back for seconds.) The state held a contest for recipes, and pretty soon people were making nutria burritos, nutria fritters, and, inevitably, nutria gumbo.
It's too early to tell if this experiment will control the nutria, but I think it's worth a try to consult the good folks of Louisiana on the kudzu problem. Maybe we can figure a way to combine the two efforts. How do you feel about fried nutria on a bed of kudzu?
I'll bring the Tabasco sauce.
© 1998 Jerry D. Rhoades, Jr.