In Texas, a French Killer Is Hired to Do Job Americans Couldn’t
They’ve burned it, bulldozed it, hacked it and poisoned it. Now they want to try wasps -- imported from France, no less.
The target is carrizo cane, a bamboo-like reed that’s a fearsome enemy of officers patrolling the Texas-Mexico border. Dense stands have camouflaged stash houses, half-ton steers and a caged Bengal tiger someone tried to sneak into the country.
“I’ve heard agents talk about it like it was Sherwood Forest,” said Francis Reilly, an environmental consultant and adviser to the U.S. Border Patrol. “They’d hear screams or gunfire in the cane thickets, and not be able to find anybody when they went in.”
The federal government has spent millions trying to prune the stuff. Now Texas is coming to the rescue -- or is at least trying to -- with Governor Greg Abbott signing a law in May to create a $10 million carrizo-purge program at the State Soil and Water Conservation Board. It turns out there’s nothing in the budget to cover it, though officials are hunting for the funds. They would finance the efforts of John Goolsby, a U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist who wants to unleash armies of French carrizo-eating wasps along the Rio Grande.
Texas, in other words, aims to fight an invasive foreign species by bringing in another foreign species.
What could possibly go wrong?
The classic example of biological control gone awry is the 1883 introduction of the mongoose to Hawaii to kill off sugar cane-hungry rats. Instead, the pointy-nosed weasels feasted on chickens, endangered sea turtles and the eggs of the state bird.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-12/in-texas-a-french-killer-is-hired-to-do-job-americans-couldn-t
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