The state of Pennsylvania is so wide, mein herr.
Not only up and down but side to side, mein herr.
I couldn’t even cross it if I tried, mein herr.
But I eat what I find
inch by inch
step by step
mile by mile
pine by pine…
In the mid-80s, Pennsylvania was undergoing our turn at the crisis known as the Great Northeastern Gypsy Moth Invasion. For about three years we stepped on caterpillars, got stung by caterpillars, got pooped on by caterpillars, while the Appalachians went as bald as Patrick Stewart. I’m sure there’s not a Pennsylvanian who was alive in 1986 who doesn’t remember having to move picnic tables out from under trees in order to have a barbecue that wasn’t seasoned with processed maple bits. I remember stepping on them, scraping eggs off of trees and posts, killing individual breeding moths, and watching the airplanes dust. And then it just stopped.
Did the spraying stop them? Or did they just move further down the Alleghenies, as they’d moved in from New England and New York? Are there states that are still dealing with them? What happened to the gypsy moths?
I can remember camping in the Adirondacks that summer and being kept awake by the sound of caterpillars chewing and the rain of litter. Gypsy moths seem to have a cyclic population growth, possibly an evolutionary tool to keep predator populations down.
In most cases, natural plagues like that balance themselves out one way or another - usually either by producing abundant resources to boost predator/parasite/pathogen population, or by depleting food resources (it’s the old foxes and rabbits thing).
We had a ‘plague’ of ladybirds(USA: ladybugs) here in the UK in 1976; in some places they formed a thick layer on the ground, causing cars to skid and crash. The phenomenon just burned itself out due to lack of food(aphids).
Of course, with organisms that eat a wide variety of different plant matter (say, locusts), in areas where humans repeatedly attempt to densely replant cultivated crops, then the above doesn’t always apply.
I remember that vividly! I had gone out sailing in Chichester Harbour with my grandfather. The water was bright red with them as far as the eye could see - and it wasn’t just one layer, it was ladybirds all the way down for a few centimetres. The ones that didn’t drown were biting. Apparently they came over the channel from France.
We went through the exact same thing in Ontario. And yes, it was just like the ebaumsworld photos. My family had a pool in those days, and it was really, really, REALLY gross to step on those things on the concrete in your bare feet. But it was unavoidable.
shudder
I don’t know why the plague stopped, but thank goodness it did.
They were already pretty bad when I lived in Binghamton, N.Y. in 1982. The trees hadn’t been devastated, but you could hear the fall of “frass” (that, I learned, is the correct word for “caterpillar poop”) as if it was rain, even on a clear day.
Yep, I was in my hometown Kingston for the infestation. People put sticky bands around the trees to catch them when they descended at night (during the day? not remembering the details)
I grew up (and still live) in NH. I seem to remember the infestation as being around '82 or so (I was 6). I can remember walking barefoot down the road and trying not to step on any, yet always ending up stepping on a few (eww- wet and hairy!). I also remember my bike tires becoming slick from running them over. And those sticky bands people put around trees that gigi mentioned were a common sight. I remember that the bands would still be visible years later as a strange stain on the tree trunks. On to the OP: I thought they were cyclical in their infestations. I remember hearing back then that they’d return in 20 years. In fact, I was riding throught the mountains yesterday and noticed the trees along route 93 up in Plymouth, NH being covered with Gypsy Moth tents, kinda like how I remember the trees when I was a kid. So, will they come back?