Ladybugs Help New York As Pest Killers

October 21, 2007 By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer
Ladybugs Help New York As Pest Killers (AP)

The fountain and park inside Stuyvesant Town is seen in this Aug. 30, 2006 file photo in New York. Groundskeepers at one of New York's biggest apartment complexes released the red-and-black creatures into the greenery Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007, on the sprawling 40-acres of high rises on the East Side to harm and destroy pests infesting the neatly landscaped property. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)

(AP) -- It sounds like a horror movie: 720,000 ladybugs on the attack in Manhattan. In this real life story, however, the red-and-black bugs have been unleashed on the 80-acre grounds of one of New York's biggest apartment complexes with a mission: eat pests infesting the neatly landscaped property.



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Elenneth
Oct 22, 2007

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Biowarfare in a new light... the use of one organism to control another organism, a type of population control that has been in use for a very long time, but not one that people tend to think about often.

In fact, many problems of pests today are due to humans REMOVING the population controls. Remove the predator and all of a sudden the prey population explodes, unhealthy for both the prey and us as humans.

The other problem comes when people introduce a new predator to try and control a pest population without first conducting adequate research, only to realize that the predator is preying on another species and wreaking more havok than the original pest population!

Ah, the wonderful world of species interactions.
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