Re: earwigs
- Subject: Re: earwigs
- From: L* R* <l*@peak.org>
- Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:10:52 -0800 (PST)
Earwigs are certainly among the most innocuous "pests" in the garden:
they do some damage to tender plants, eg, some flower petals, maybe
seedlings. But their mixed diet also includes small insects and insect
eggs. On balance, they may be benenficial to gardeners!
The European earwig reached the Pacific Northwest [form Vancouver BC to
Western Oregon sometime in the 1920s, and immediately threw people into a
panic. Not the damage they were doing, but the incredible numbers, wierd
and menacing appearance, and habit of getting into things. [I have had
personal experience of the Anglo-Saxon etymological root of "earwig,
another story...]
In the 1960s I worked for an entomologist at the University of Washington
who'd been through Seattle's Earwig Wars of 1930-33. He had a notebook of
newspaper clippings detailing this bizarre episode, in which an
enterprising soul took advantage of panic over the new invader to
establsih a sinecure for himself in the depths of the Great Depression.
The gentleman in question formed a pressure group to "do something" about
the earwig epidemic, and got the Seattle City Council to form the city
Earwig Commission with himself as Director, on the provision that the
Earwig Commission would be self-financing.
Financing was no problem for the Earwig Commissar: he got Council
approval to require that all property owners who were found to harbor
earwigs must set out poison bait for the earwigs. And he also got a
monopoly on poison bait. Initially, the scheme went without opposition.
But soon, the Earwig Commission became controversial with Seattle's two
major daily newspapers coming down on either side. The P-I, a Hearst
paper, whole-heartedly supported the Commission [I've always supposed that
this reflected anti-immigrant anxiety], while the more liberal Times
printed story after story of fraud committed by the earwig inspectors,
including billing for non-existent bait, and citations for non-existent
earwigs..
In the end, the initial population surge of earwigs rebounded to
reasonable levels, partly due to introduction of a parasitic fly, and most
probably people simply got used to earwigs... But the cap to the story
in Seattle was that University of Washington professor Trevor Kinkaid [a
pioneer naturalist who I met once on the occasion of his 100th birthday]
announced that the "European ground beetle" had come to Seattle and was
doing deadly battle with the earwigs. The Seattle Times breathlessly
announced block-by-block progress of the ground beetle, victory in the
Earwig Wars was announced, and the Earwig Commissar and his henchmen
presumably went on to honest work.
loren russell, corvallis, oregon
