A mealy bug is devastating the cane that holds the land on the Louisiana coast in place. Without the cane, many square miles of land may wash away.
Fire, parasites, and insecticide have all been proposed to deal with a plague of tiny translucent bugs currently plaguing the Louisiana coast. The bugs are a previously unknown entity. According to Darryl Fears, reporting in The Washington Post, "entomologist Rodrigo Diaz said researchers only recently discovered the foreign family of insects to which the invasive species belongs, called Aclerdidae, which is native to Japan and China." The marshes that the bugs are consuming serve an important purpose. "The Louisiana cane is crucial to staving off land loss. It builds soil in an area that lost 250 square miles of coast to erosion and sinking land over about a half century," writes Fears.
All strategies for dealing with this plague of bugs carry their own risks, according to Fears. "An idea for a controlled burn is derived from China, where blazes are set in marshes to get rid of the swarm. But fire can spread, and the Louisiana coast has a network of oil and gas wells that could explode in flames."
Read the full story: Louisiana’s coast was already sickly. Now it’s being hit by a plague
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