ants essays

ants essays Pests are living organisms that can threaten human existence. They can bring disease, famine, death and destruction to the human world. The United States loses up to forty percent of their production each year to pest, twenty percent of which is lost after harvest once stored. To control this mass destruction pesticides are created to kill pests and prevent their reproduction. The main groups of pesticides are named for the type of pest they are aimed at killing; insecticides are for insects, fungicides for fungi, and herbicides for weeds. The production of pesticides is a 300-million dollar business in the United States. The sad thing to say is that with all the production every meal you eat contains some evidence of pesticide residue. Most pesticides are poison and often contain ingredients the same as those found in nerve gas. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, DDT, is an insecticide used to reduce the spread of malaria by killing mosquitoes. Paul Muller developed it in 1945. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. The chief of preventive medicine for the United States Army pronounced DDT as the Wars (World War 2) greatest contribution to the future health of the world, (Russell). In its fifty-five years of use it has been estimated to save over seven million lives through out the world. Pesticides are often times made to withstand rain so that they are not easily washed away; therefore they exist in the environment for long periods of time. Due to the long-term exposure DDT accumulates in insects, which make up the diet of other animals and then works its way through out the food chain. For example, the bald eagle became an endangered species, plunging toward extinction, largely because DDT thinned their eggshells to the point that the birds were unable to reproduce. Eagles picked up DDT when they ate fish, which were contaminated when the insecticide washed into water. A...