The boll weevil infestation is estimated to have caused crop losses of 30 to 50 percent in infested areas.The eradication program led to increased crop yields (by 10 percent or more) and a dramatic decrease in the use of insecticides (40 100 percent), leading to a reduction in production costs.
No matter how many pesticides you use, if you get the wrong weather conditions or you get an infestation of aphids or whatever, you're smaller than nature.
Still, I would rather go weeks without power than have to deal with what Nicola from Birmingham University returned to after the Christmas holidays: an infestation of slugs on her bed.
If you thought the shark infestation was just a saltwater problem, think again.
The killer blow would then be administered by something else: a mite infestation, perhaps, or a fungal infection, or whatever else happened to turn up that a healthy hive would have shrugged off.
An infestation can spread so quickly that the federal government spends $15m each year just to hang fly traps in areas known to be attractive to medflies.
Anecdotal evidence suggests more rats are being seen in parks and on subway platforms where, at a foot in length and a pound or more in weight, they are hard to ignore.One Brooklyn neighbourhood held a "Rat Fair" in a local park this month as a protest against infestation.
In any event, recent British Columbian winters have not been cold enough to kill the beetles.The infestation is gathering pace: foresters fear that by 2013 four-fifths of British Columbia's central-southern pine forest will be gone.
These might include fertility, fecundity, social status, present health, and likely resistance to future infection and infestation.
The deadly spores were being blown across it.Seven months later, as surging summer temperatures cause the fungus to multiply rapidly, the horrifying scale of the infestation is becoming plain.
The group argues that its internal materials (which claim, among other things, that expensive courses of treatment can help rid people of infestation by alien souls from an extinct civilisation) are commercially confidential and protected by copyright.
