April 30, 2001







Edward Tenner



p. 121. Henry Schieffelin released 100 pairs of starlings in New York

City's Central Park in 1890 and 1891.



p. 124. Leopold Trouvelot tried raising gypsy moths to replace

silkworms in Connecticut. In 1869 a storm blew away the protective

netting.



p. 129. In the 1870's, the US government gave away free carp adn tried

hard to spread them across the country. They are now the most common

American freshwater fish. In 1895 a later Commissioner of Fish and

Fisheries, George Mills said,"Tim has now established their

worthlessness, and our waters are suffering from their presence.  As a

food fish they are regarded as inferior to the native chub and sucker,

while their tenacity to life and everlasting hunger given them a

reputation for 'stayers' and 'feeders'  unheard of in any fish reports

I have seen up to date.' (p. 130).  They eatthe wild celery, wild

rice, and pond weeds that waterfowl and other fish ate.  They stir up

the bottoms for food, robbing plants of light and hurting sight-

feeding fish.



 "In Montana, where minute oppossum shrimp were introduced in a number

of small lakes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, kokanee salmon

flourished as expected. But a strange thing happened when the shrimp

migrated downstream to the much larger and deeper Flathead Lake.

There, and in some other North American lakes, they stayed near the

bottom of the lake during the day, when the salmon were near the top.

They rose only at night for feeding-- when the salmon were unable to

get them.  And they devoured much of the plankton that otherwise would

have fed the salmon.   The result was an exploding shrimp population,

a virtual collapse of the salmon catch, the disappearance of eagles

and other wildlife that depended on the salmon run, and the absence of

tens of thousands of tourists and birdwatchers who had once thronged

each autumn to see as many as a hundred bald eagles at a time at the

salmon's spawning run in Glacier National Park." (p. 136)



"During the New Deal the U.S.  Soil Conservation Service advocated

kudzu as a plant that could restore Southern cotton lands devastated

by insects, erosion, and the Depression.... In 1988 a U.S. Forestry

Service official estimated timber losses caused by kudzu in Alabama,

Georgia, and Mississippi at up to $175 million.... It pulls down

telephone poles, blacks out neighborhoods by warming local  power

transformers until they trip, and shorts high-voltage lines on long-

distance  electric transmission towers.  Once planted by highway

deparments to stabilize roadsides, it now obliterates traffic signs

and spreads over bridges." (p. 146)



The Soil Conservation Service promoted multiflora rose starting in the

1930's. From 1940 to 1960 farmers in North Carolina alone planted

over 14 million roses. (p. 147)  Now, over 2 million acres of former

pastureland are dense with multiflora rose (p. 148).