Science: Grasshopper Time

The nation’s annual plague of grasshoppers was beginning early last week in Mississippi, where the hoppers were crunching through corn and cotton fields, eating everything in sight except the evilest-tasting weeds. Farmers were fighting them in an approved modern manner: with bait of wheat bran flavored with white arsenic.

According to the grasshopper map published each year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the most threatened area this summer is in Montana, near the Canadian border. But last year’s grasshoppers laid their eggs in the soil of many western and midwestern states. What the young hoppers need is a good long spell of dry weather to nurse them along to destructive maturity. The grasshoppers that do the most damage are primarily a semidesert species. Wet weather blights them in youth.