Save the kudzu!
You know kudzu: that tenacious green creeping vine that poses a menace to trees,
outbuildings, and the slow-moving elderly because of its incredible rate of growth and
the fact that it’s harder to kill than that guy in the hockey mask in the “Friday the 13th”
movies. Kudzu is as much a part of the Southern landscape as grits, Goody’s Headache
Powders, and Moon Pies. Well now, it seems some Yankee scientist is trying to come
up with a way to wipe out the official weed of the deep South. Here’s the plan:
There’s apparently this caterpillar called the soybean looper. Said critter, true to its name, likes to live on
soybeans, but also has a taste for kudzu. This bug is also the primary food for a type of
wasp that lays its eggs in the caterpillar’s body, sort of like those nasty bug villains in the
movie “Alien”. When the eggs hatch and the little parasites start to grow inside the
caterpillar, the caterpillar gets REAL hungry and starts wolfing down kudzu faster than
Drew Carey at a beer-drinking contest. Eventually, the caterpillar meets a tragic end as
the baby wasps consume him from inside, leaving-I’m quoting from the story here- “a
husk of wasp larva behind”.
Charming. Leave it to the boys from NC State to come up
with something like this.
I have a bad feeling about this. For one thing, I kind of LIKE kudzu. If you’re bored,
you can amuse yourself by finding shapes in it, sort of like looking for shapes in the
clouds. And if you have an old abandoned building or some junked cars on your property,
kudzu will come and cover up those eyesores with a nice green blanket before the
zoning commission can get there. But, more importantly, this is the type of
well-meaning mucking about with nature that led us to this problem in the first place.
See, the Federal Government originally imported kudzu from Japan as an erosion control
measure way back in 1932. With no natural enemies the stuff took off like-well, like
kudzu, and pretty soon, it was everywhere. (Doesn’t it just figure that the Feds would be
involved in there somewhere? To screw something up on this scale, you’ve got to have
the Federal Government.)
Let’s think about this for a moment. The kudzu gets eaten, then
the kudzu eating caterpillar gets eaten, leaving behind...a whole truckload of wasps.
Now, which would you rather have: a plague of kudzu or a plague of wasps, even
supposedly stingless ones?
Someone has not thought this thing through.
In contrast, let’s look at the way the state of Louisiana is trying to deal with its nutria
problem. The nutria is a kind of big, ugly ratlike critter with orange teeth that lives in the
bayous (Bayou is Louisianian for swamp). They’re native to South America, but the guy
who invented Tabasco sauce (this is true) imported a bunch of them to raise for fur.
Unfortunately, the experiment failed when the bottom fell out of the market for
swamp-rat fur. Go figure. One night, during a hurricane, the nutria got loose and vanished
into the bayous. Everyone thought they’d all get eaten by gators, and good riddance. But
the nutria, being hardy little rodents, multiplied like special prosecutors, although the
nutria are a lot cuter. Pretty soon, they were eating all the vegetation in sight and were
hollering for dessert. Louisiana tried trapping, they tried poison, they tried everything
they could think of, to no avail. Finally, they came up with a uniquely Louisianian
response: they decided to eat them. (Remember, these are the people who gave us
crawfish gumbo. These people could make a meal out of asphalt fragments and dead
leaves and have you scraping the bowl and coming back for seconds.) The state held a
contest for recipes, and pretty soon people were making nutria burritos, nutria fritters,
and, inevitably, nutria gumbo.
It’s too early to tell if this experiment will control the
nutria, but I think it’s worth a try to consult the good folks of Louisiana on the kudzu
problem. Maybe we can figure a way to combine the two efforts. How do you feel about
fried nutria on a bed of kudzu?
I’ll bring the Tabasco sauce.
1998 Jerry D. Rhoades, Jr.