. Cranberries; : the national cranberry magazine. Cranberries. Hope for Bugged Farmers: Utah Scientist Seeks Successor to DDT Are the mosquitos bugging you in the bogs this year, and do you rue the day that DDT was banned? Well, be of good cheer. A scient- ist at Utah's Brigham Young Uni- versity may have the answer to your prayers-and that of a lot of other Americans. For the past seven years. Dr. Gary Booth has experimented with the insecticide Dimilin. He says it could replace significant uses of DDT with little environmental ef- fect. According to Dr. Booth, the chemical appears to give ex
. Cranberries; : the national cranberry magazine. Cranberries. Hope for Bugged Farmers: Utah Scientist Seeks Successor to DDT Are the mosquitos bugging you in the bogs this year, and do you rue the day that DDT was banned? Well, be of good cheer. A scient- ist at Utah's Brigham Young Uni- versity may have the answer to your prayers-and that of a lot of other Americans. For the past seven years. Dr. Gary Booth has experimented with the insecticide Dimilin. He says it could replace significant uses of DDT with little environmental ef- fect. According to Dr. Booth, the chemical appears to give excellent control on at least 30 species of insects, including several species of mosquitos, cotton boll weevil, cab- bage butterfly, Colorado potato beetle, tussock moth, cabbage loopers, stable fly, horn fly, house fly, hemlock looper and several soybean insects. The Environmental Protection Agency has already granted registra- tion of Dimilin for use on the gypsy moth, one of the serious defoliators of America's northeastern forests. Petitions to use Dimilin on soy- beans, cotton and mosquitoes are now pending before the EPA. Dr. Booth is hoping for approval some- time this year. Dimilin is a relatively simple compound as far as insecticides go. It was discovered by scientists in the Phillips-Duphar labs in Holland who were trying to put two very effective herbicides together to make a topnotch weed killer. The results wouldn't kill a single weed, but proved to be very effective on insects. Dimilin acts by interfering with the synthesis and desposition of chitin, a structural substance that is one of the main components of insect exoskeletons. As a chitin inhibitor, Dimilin interferes with the formation of the larva's cuticle. At the time of molt, the treated insect's cuticle is improperly formed, which results in death from rupture of the new malformed cuti- cle. The insect simply starves to death. In the United States, Dimilin is being developed by the Thompson- Hayward Chem
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