40 Fun Facts About Pesticides

Which major US airline began as Huff Daland Dusters, a crop-dusting outfit that fought boll weevils?

Delta grew out of the world's first aerial crop-dusting company and kept a dusting division until 1966.

Which children's author spent more than a decade drawing cartoon ads for Flit, a common bug spray?

Dr. Seuss said he landed the Flit job after an advertising executive's wife spotted one of his cartoons at a hairdresser's.

Which rat poison, named after a Wisconsin research foundation, is also prescribed as a blood thinner?

Warfarin went on sale as a rat poison in 1948 before doctors adopted it, and President Eisenhower took it after his 1955 heart attack.

Which fungicide began as a bitter spray to stop passersby eating roadside grapes in French vineyards?

Bordeaux mixture, a blend of copper sulfate and lime, caught a botany professor's eye when the sprayed roadside vines stayed free of mildew.

Which Rachel Carson book turned Americans against DDT and helped launch the environmental movement?

Silent Spring drew fierce opposition from chemical companies, yet it swayed public opinion and led to a US ban on DDT in farming.

Which Indian city suffered the world's worst industrial disaster when a pesticide plant leaked gas in 1984?

Bhopal was home to a Union Carbide plant that made the insecticide Sevin; the gas that escaped, methyl isocyanate, was an ingredient in it.

Which defoliant mix did US aircraft spray over Vietnam in Operation Ranch Hand to strip away jungle cover?

Agent Orange was named for the orange identifying stripe on the 55-gallon drums it was stored in.

In 1960, after years of DDT spraying in Borneo, the RAF parachuted in crates of which animals to fight rats?

Cats were flown in from Singapore; one much-repeated theory says insecticide spraying had killed off the local ones, though that was never confirmed.

DEET, the active ingredient in many bug sprays, was developed in the 1940s for which organization?

The US Army wanted protection after the jungle warfare of World War II; DEET was first tested as a farm insecticide and reached civilians in 1957.

Which household container first proved itself in World War II as a soldiers' 'bug bomb' against mosquitoes?

The aerosol can let troops in the Pacific spray insecticide inside tents and airplanes, and the two men credited with the modern design worked for a US government insect bureau.

DDT thinned the eggshells of eagles and ospreys by cutting the supply of which mineral to the shell gland?

Calcium transport into the shell gland is cut by DDE, DDT's breakdown product, so affected raptors laid thin-shelled eggs that often cracked before hatching.

Pyrethrum, a natural insecticide, is made from the dried flower heads of which garden plant?

Chrysanthemum flowers of the Dalmatian species, named for a stretch of the Balkan coast, are dried and ground to make the powder.

Which type of pesticide is the most common worldwide, accounting for about half of all pesticide use?

Herbicides, the weedkillers, lead every other kind; the first big synthetic one, 2,4-D, arrived in the 1940s alongside DDT.

The word pesticide joins the Latin 'caedere', meaning to kill, with 'pestis', a Latin word meaning what?

Plague, or deadly disease, was the meaning of pestis in Latin, the same root that gives English the word pestilence.

The microbe behind the insecticide spinosad was found in soil from a disused still that once made which spirit?

Rum had been made at the idle sugar mill in the Virgin Islands where the soil sample was collected.

Glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller, was first sold by Monsanto in 1974 under which brand name?

Roundup took off after Monsanto engineered crops that survive it, letting farmers spray whole fields and kill only the weeds.

Which country is the world's biggest user of the poison 1080, dropped from aircraft to kill possums?

New Zealand has no native ground-dwelling mammals, so every possum the bait is aimed at descends from animals brought in by people.

Which US agency, created in 1970, took over pesticide regulation from the Department of Agriculture?

The EPA opened in December 1970 and within two years had cancelled most uses of DDT.

Chlordane was used in some 30 million American homes before a 1988 ban, to protect them from which pests?

Termites were the one target left after regulators banned every other use of chlordane in 1983, five years before the final ban.

A global treaty restricting DDT still allows spraying against the mosquitoes that carry which disease?

Malaria control is the reason the Stockholm Convention restricts DDT instead of banning it; the treaty outlawed nine of its 'dirty dozen' chemicals outright.

Chili powder is added to some seed mixes to deter rodents because which animals cannot feel the burn of capsaicin?

Birds lack the heat response that mammals have to capsaicin, which suits chili plants: the seeds pass through them intact and sprout elsewhere.

Which animal, released in Queensland in 1935 to eat crop-destroying beetles, became a pest across Australia?

Cane toad releases followed apparent successes in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, but in Australia the cure turned into a pest of its own.

Molluscicides are pesticides scattered as pellets in gardens to kill which crop-eating pests?

Slugs and snails are gastropod mollusks, which is why the same products are also sold as snail bait and slug pellets.

Which nerve agent did German chemists discover in 1938 while trying to create stronger pesticides?

Sarin was named in honor of its discoverers, led by Gerhard Schrader, whose pesticide research had already produced the nerve agent tabun.

Bt, a caterpillar-killing pesticide allowed in organic farming, is made from which kind of living thing?

A bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, is named for the German region of Thuringia, where it was found killing flour moth caterpillars.

Which arsenic-laced pigment, loved by 19th-century painters, became the first widely used chemical insecticide?

Paris green moved from palettes to potato fields in 1867, when farmers in Illinois and Indiana found it killed the Colorado potato beetle.

Which drug reached US buyers laced with the weedkiller paraquat after Mexican fields were sprayed in the 1970s?

Marijuana fields were sprayed from helicopters the US sent to Mexico, and the tainted crop set off a public debate about the program.

Rotenone, an insecticide from crushed plant roots, was traditionally used by Indigenous peoples to catch what?

Fish rise to the surface when the crushed plants are stirred into the water, because rotenone interferes with their cellular respiration.

Which crop engineered by Monsanto to survive glyphosate spraying went on sale to American farmers in 1996?

Soybeans reached American farmers first, with corn following in 1998, and the trait let them spray weedkiller straight over a growing crop.

Swiss chemist Paul Müller won the 1948 Nobel Prize in which field for discovering that DDT kills insects?

Medicine, not chemistry: DDT had first been made back in 1874, but its power to kill insects went unnoticed until Müller's work in 1939.

Which insecticide class saw three main members banned from EU outdoor use in 2018 to protect bees?

Neonicotinoids are chemical cousins of nicotine, which was itself used to kill insects for centuries.

Traditional mothballs were made of which chemical, which passes straight from a solid into a moth-killing gas?

Naphthalene catches fire easily, so many modern mothballs swapped it for another chemical that also turns straight into vapor.

Which treaty on the ozone layer ordered a phase-out of methyl bromide, a fumigant used on strawberry fields?

Montreal Protocol rules cover the gas because sunlight splits it to release bromine, which destroys ozone far more readily than chlorine does.

What do scientists call the way DDT grows more concentrated at each step up a food chain?

Biomagnification happens because DDT barely dissolves in water and lodges in body fat, so each predator inherits the load of everything it eats.

Which bitter poison from the seeds of the nux-vomica tree was long used to kill rodents and other small pests?

Strychnine kills through violent muscular convulsions, yet the hard seeds are only dangerous once they are crushed or chewed.

Which louse-borne disease did DDT help contain among troops and civilians in the second half of World War II?

Typhus travels in body lice, and the lice later hit back: by 1965 they had grown resistant enough for the US military to drop DDT.

Which African country led the world in growing pyrethrum, a flower-based insecticide, through the 1990s?

Kenya supplied most of the world's pyrethrum in the 1990s, a crop known in the trade as 'py' for short.

Which flea-treatment insecticide caused a 2017 food scare when it turned up in millions of European eggs?

Fipronil had been mixed into a remedy for poultry mites, and eggs were pulled from sale in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France.

Which insect did California import from Australia in 1888 to save its citrus groves from cottony cushion scale?

A ladybug known as the vedalia beetle did the job with just 514 insects shipped over, because it feeds on nothing but that one scale insect.

Which weedkiller, widely used on American corn, has been banned in the European Union since 2004?

Atrazine is one of the most heavily used weedkillers in the United States, sprayed on golf courses and home lawns as well as crops.