Fall armyworms have been sighted at the Asia-Pacific International Baseball Training Center in Tainan, the first time the worms have been found outside of a cornfield.
They could be the offspring of the first generation of fall armyworm moths that matured in Taiwan, the Council of Agriculture said, adding that it was investigating the matter.
The Tainan City Government on Thursday notified the council’s fall armyworm reaction task force after the Tainan Department of Public Works reported what appeared to be worms of the order Lepidoptera, the task force said.
Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine
Samples collected by the Tainan Department of Agriculture and the council’s Tainan Area Agricultural Research and Extension Station were verified to be fall armyworms, it added.
Tobacco cutworm (Spodoptera litura) larvae and northern armyworms (Mythimna separata) were also discovered at the center, the task force said.
The only other field in the area was a 970m2 cornfield, on which no traces of fall armyworms were found, it said.
Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine
The first generation of moths to mature in Taiwan likely laid the eggs that hatched at the training center, Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine Director-General Feng Hai-tung (馮海東) said, adding that no fall armyworm moths were found in the area.
However, further investigation would be required to test the theory, he added.
As of Wednesday, 208 fall armyworm sightings had been reported in all municipalities except Chiayi County, 125 of which were of mature moths, bureau statistics showed.
Although the council has killed larvae or moths from 81 sightings and prescribed preventive measures for 124, the remaining three have yet to be handled, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater