Lately I find myself looking at current events thinking “we did this to ourselves” more than I would prefer. We should learn from our past mistakes. We should listen to experts. We shouldn’t bang pots at the sparrows and make them fall from the skies from exhaustion, eventually bringing mass starvation due to a plague of locusts.
I may have skipped a few steps there.
Today in your daily Moment of Science… The Four Pests Campaign, and the importance of ecological balance.
Human’s attempts to shape our ecology either by addition or subtraction have led to disastrous results. Often it’s not us, just every other species around us that suffers as an incidental result of our good intentions gone stupid. The small Indian mongoose was brought from Central Asia to several island nations in the Pacific to help with pest control. As an invasive species, the mongoose has been blamed for the extinction of several other species, and acts as a carrier for rabies and leptospirosis. The European starlings were brought to New York City as an attempt to bring every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to America. I’m sure it’s of little solace to the other bird species they’re competing out of their nests that they can chirp in iambic pentameter. Cane toads were brought to Australia with the intention of controlling pests on sugar plantations. Instead, this ginormous poisonous bugger was added to the unreasonably long list of ways you can die in Australia.
And in the mid-1950s, Mao Tse-Tung, probably better known to you as Chairman Mao, was finding what seemed like a reasonable way to manage public health. Diseases including cholera, tuberculosis, malaria, polio, smallpox, and the plague were all still endemic. Infant mortality was astronomically high. So of course… he had to start shit with the sparrows.
The Four Pests campaign was launched in 1958. Rats, flies, mosquitoes were targeted for their role in spreading diseases. Sparrows, though? They took grain. And that was enough to start a war.
There would be no mongooses or invasive poisonous toads introduced. No DDT or agent orange. The method of ridding China of the great scourge of pests would be fly swatters, drums, and shotguns. A sweeping propaganda campaign hammered home that it was a patriotic duty to fight all of these pests. It promoted various rat traps, along with swatters and netting for the insects. But the program was known as the Smash Sparrows Campaign for a reason: the main focus was on sparrows. And focus they did by destroying eggs and nests, killing chicks, shooting at the birds, and seemingly more sadistically, banging pots and pans so loud for so long so they would be unable to stop and rest on the trees, literally dropping from the sky, dead from exhaustion.
But something curious happened. Grain production did not increase as the sparrow population went down. It dropped. The ration of grain the sparrows stole was surely a nuisance, but this campaign of terror against their natural crop insurance gave way to a much more devastating pest.
Autopsies on the sparrows revealed that, though they ate grain, a large share of their diet was composed of insects. Specifically, locusts. They were, in fact, the link in the food chain keeping the locust population in check.
It’s estimated that one billion sparrows were killed in the Four Pests campaign. That caused, in scientific terms, a locust problem of biblical proportions.
The locusts contributed to such a devastating famine, it’s estimated that 20-55 million people died.
There’s still a version of the ‘Four Pests’ Campaigns, but sparrows were swapped out and have been alternated with cockroaches and bedbugs. Hopefully we’ll be a little wiser next time we try to micromanage our local ecology, lest we drop a poisonous Shakespearean mongoose from the sky to control the locust population and accidentally bring back agentorangepox. But just in case, I’m already practicing saying as a battle cry in iambic pentameter to round up the dread Shakespearean mongoose, “we did this to ourselves.”
This has been your daily Moment of Science, and your reminder to refill your bird feeder.
Join the discussion!