Agricultural sabotage?
The article “Su sounds alarm over armyworms” (June 13, page 1) raises some questions that deserve attention.
The very first sentence states: “Fall armyworms believed to have flown across the Taiwan Strait from China are wreaking havoc on farms in Miaoli, Yilan and Chiayi counties, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) told an impromptu meeting at the legislature yesterday.”
As a former professor in risk management, that seems both very alarming and much short of what I would expect.
The life cycle of moths and butterflies has only one stage at which the animals can fly: the adult stage. I know of instances in which these insects travel long distances in their migrations, but they are all over land.
In this case, if moths were flying away from China at this time of year, the winds would be helping them fly north-northeast, so landfall would likely be in Japan or Korea after thousands of kilometers.
To get to Taiwan they would need to have westerly winds and could be coming from Fujian, with only 500km to be covered in their lifespan from the time of emergence from the pupa to the time they normally lay their eggs.
Data on the maximum length of time that a moth can hold the eggs in her body are not well-described in literature; the only Internet estimate I found for that interval is six days. That would make it necessary for the moths to travel 500km in six days with no place to rest, feed or obtain fresh water.
If the infestation were wind-borne we would have some idea of the source of the migration if we had information about the age of the eggs and the larvae at the various sites where an infestation was found, but I see no indication from the article that any priority is being assigned to that endeavor.
Moreover, that Nantou County has not been implicated might suggest that mechanisms other than wind-borne migration might be at play.
Perhaps of equal importance would be an effort to determine whether this year there have been unusual meteorological events in China that have led to unusual wind patterns with a strong easterly component. That might indicate that it was those abnormal conditions that could have given rise to the current situation. Such action might not be easy in view of recent reported moves by China to have Taiwanese delegates excluded from international conferences.
Given the current not-so-friendly state of relations between China and Taiwan, is it not worth considering that agricultural sabotage might be a factor to consider? Are we watching for travelers and commercial vessels bringing in insects from China as carefully as we are monitoring pig products?
Emilio Venezian
New Taipei City
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