July 01, 2007

The Bug that Brought Russia to its Knees

Growing up in Denver, I never had much of an opportunity to develop a green thumb. Now, living in a remote village in western Russia, I have found that tending a garden is a necessity. There are no stores in our village, and the closest market is nearly 40 miles away, down a treacherous road. Yet I could not have imagined that I would spend a good part of my summers bent over potato plants, squashing little orange larvae and their black-and-white striped parents until my thumbs were stained not green but bright orange.

Many Russians believe that this pest, known as the Colorado potato beetle, was sent here by the Americans after World War II to devastate the all-important potato crop and bring Russia to its knees. As an American from Colorado, I am held personally responsible by my neighbors for the damage the beetle causes in our village.

Until recently, the Colorado potato beetle, oval in shape and about half the size of my thumbnail, was only known in Russia to a few well-traveled entomologists. Today, however, even politicians are not cursed as often as the little striped beetle, which wreaks more havoc in rural Russia than economic crises and political reforms combined. The tiny creatures rob every Russian family of their main dietary staple – the potato. Armies of the invaders march out of the soil for the short growing season, occupying potato fields and summer plots from Ukraine to Siberia. The potato beetle eats the leaves and even the stems of the potato plant, resulting in poorer productivity, smaller potatoes, and lower amounts of starch and protein. Left unchecked, the beetles kill the plants altogether. Each year, the seemingly innocuous potato beetle destroys as much as 40% of Russia’s potato harvest. It is possible that in the history of civilization, never has a nation seen such large-scale devastation by one insect.

The Colorado potato beetle likely originated in northeastern Mexico. It was first discovered by Thomas Nuttal in 1811 and described in 1824 by Thomas Say from specimens collected in the Rocky Mountains. The native host for the insect is the buffalo bur, a relative of the potato. Yet after settlers began introducing potatoes in the insect’s original range in the western United States in the mid-1800s – including in Colorado in 1944, from whence the insect got its name – the beetle developed a taste for the green leaves and tubers of the potato plant. Finding potato plantations easier to inhabit than vast fields with widely dispersed edible wild plants, populations of the insects began to flourish. The insect soon began its rapid spread eastward – on its wings or mixed in with potato harvests being shipped east. Advancing steadily about 85 miles a year, the beetle reached the Atlantic coast by 1874. There, beetles hitched rides on potatoes crossing the Atlantic by ship and opened their front in Europe. By the end of the 1930s, the beetles inhabited nearly every European country. Within a decade, the first insects crossed the western border of the Soviet Union to degust Ukrainian and Belarusan potatoes. The post-war famine that pervaded the Soviet Union at the time did not help matters – potatoes were transported to starving regions, and the beetles got a free ride into western Russia.

Despite ensuing attempts by the Soviet government to wage war on the beetle through prohibiting transport of potatoes to uninfected regions and counter-attacking with pesticides, the devastation continued to spread. With no natural enemies in Russia (only pheasants are said to eat the larvae with any enthusiasm), the beetles’ march continues to this day. Recently, the insects crossed the Urals into western Siberia, and they have spread into the Altai Mountains from Central Asia. Cold and permafrost seem to be the only limiting factors to the north and east, but global warming may soon allow the beetle to continue its expansion. Scientists have identified new subspecies of the beetle, which are acclimated to more extreme weather conditions.

In many European countries, the beetle has been classified as a quarantined pest, and the governments have actively – and successfully – worked to eradicate it since WWII.

Perhaps the beetle’s hardiness and ability to adapt to less than ideal conditions is related to its life cycle. Adult beetles overwinter in the soil at a depth of up to half a meter. They can live without food for up to two months after emerging in spring, allowing plenty of time for potato shoots to appear. When the potato sprouts emerge, the beetles feed on the fresh green leaves. Here they also mate. Females deposit over 300 eggs in batches of 10 to 40 eggs on the underside of the host plant’s leaves during a period of about a month. After hatching in four to five days, the larvae transform during four stages lasting a total of 21 days. The larvae feed almost continuously on the leaves of the host plant. Then they burrow into the soil to construct a spherical cell and transform into yellowish pupae. Some of the beetles overwinter for as long as three years, ensuring a reserve of beetles in case of poor food supply. And what if there are no potatoes? No problem. The hardy beetle can feed and survive on a number of other plants in the nightshade family, including eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, tobacco, horse-nettle, common nightshade, and others.

Interestingly, beetles use the potato plant much more effectively than people. In the spring, they feed on fresh shoots. In the summer, they eat the flowers and stems. In the late summer and fall, they feed on the tubers until going into hibernation. Scientific experiments have determined that the beetles find the potato plants by scent. The beetles only fly when the temperature is nearly 80 degrees and the air pressure is low. In these conditions, they disperse using rising masses of hot air to boost them and take them far and wide. The beetles don’t sink in water, so can use rivers as a means of dispersal as well.

Russia has felt the brunt of the beetle blight more severely than other nations, in a large part due to the importance of the potato in the country’s diet and culture. Russians lead the world in per capita potato consumption – 90% of the world’s potatoes are produced in Russia and Europe. In the Russian Empire, Catherine the Great first directed her subjects to plant potatoes, but many failed to comply (see “Tuber or Not Tuber: Russia’s Hate-Love Relationship with the Potato,” in the Sep/Oct 2000 issue of Russian Life). The Orthodox Church supported this dissension, wary of the tuber as it was not mentioned in the Bible. Potatoes were not widely cultivated in Russia until the mid-1800s, when Tsar Nicholas I began to enforce Catherine’s directive. Peter the Great later supported the trend in his attempts to modernize the country. Soon the potato replaced the turnip as Russia’s main staple, next to bread. By 1908, Russia was producing 29 million tons of potatoes a year. Today, Russia is the world’s second largest producer of potatoes. And potatoes have infiltrated the lives of every Russian family.

As soon as the snow melts and the soil is soft enough to be churned, city-dwelling Russians migrate to their dachas (summer houses) to join country-dwelling Russians in the important task of planting potatoes. The May holidays – from Labor Day on May 1 to Victory Day on May 10 – are the traditional period when Russians in the western part of the country plow their plots and plant potatoes, using egg-sized seeds from the previous years’ crop, stored in underground cellars.

Even though potatoes are sold inexpensively in stores and marketplaces, most Russians feel obliged to grow their own. Perhaps this tradition is a holdover from times when potatoes saved millions of lives during famines, collectivization, war, and other hardships. Or it helps families buffer their food expenses in the face of rapidly inflating prices. Potato gardens also provide a good excuse to get out of the city on weekends and spend time at the dacha. For much of the rural population, potatoes and other vegetables supplement meager pensions and low salaries. Now the never-ending battle against the Colorado potato beetle has been added to the common toil of tilling the soil, weeding, watering, and caring for the plants.

Youths rarely understand their parents’ desire to plant potatoes or fight the beetle bane, and it is a constant source of tension between the generations. My husband Igor recalls how, throughout his childhood, each spring he and his two brothers were sent out to tend the extensive plots and collect potato beetles. His father thought of a way to entice them to help. He’d give the boys a kopek for every beetle collected. Igor got smart quick – instead of collecting the beetles on his parents’ well-maintained plot, he crossed over to the collective farm’s field and collected beetles by the bucket-full, raking in a fortune, until his father caught him one day and gave him a good lashing.

You won’t catch Igor near a potato field these days. He leaves the beetle plucking to me. My battle against the beetle begins shortly after the plants sprout, with meticulous inspection of the leaves and removing the adult beetles, which appear first. I toss them into a bucket, then fill it with water and leave them to drown. Igor’s father – whose plot is much more extensive than mine, takes two brooms and gently lashes the plants, sweeping the beetles into a shallow trough. At the end of the day, he flays them with a gas torch or sprays them with pesticide.

After the adult insects lay their little orange larvae on the underside of leaves, I squish the larvae or prune the leaves. Some of the beetles avoid inspection and larvae continue to develop. When the beetles cover the plants en masse, the plants are reduced to nothing but their scraggly stems and rarely recover. Some people spray the plants with pesticides, but even the strongest chemicals have little impact – the next generation of the pests is often resistant. As the beetles spend a large portion of their life cycle underground, it is nearly impossible to poison them all. The situation is worsened by the fact that small private plots in the countryside are situated next to each other, so poisoning the beetles on one plot means they will find refuge on another nearby plot and eventually return. Yet many Russians pour pesticides onto the plants several times a season, and the chemicals accumulate in the potatoes, slowly poisoning the nation.

When I asked a potato farmer how he fights the beetle infestation, he simply replied “Poison them to death, that’s all you can do.” Farmers that sell their goods to others are not as concerned with the amount of pesticides poured onto the plants (and there is no Russian FDA to regulate or oversee such things). Russian families that grow their own potatoes tend to be more cautious with using pesticides and generally prefer traditional means like hand-plucking the pests. Russian scientists are now experimenting with genetically-modified potatoes used in the West, which the beetles will not eat or which kill the insects. Agrarians argue that, because these breeds of potatoes require fewer pesticides, they are better for you. But Russians are skeptical: “If it kills the beetles, it will kill us, too.”

At the end of the growing season, if I have managed to salvage any of the potato plants from the infestation at all (the end result directly depending on how much time and energy I put into tending the plants), Igor and I dig up the potatoes. Then we burn the upturned plants to make sure no potato beetles will remain to burrow underground until next year. But, somehow, they always find a way to outsmart us and, sure as spring, they pop up the next year to go forth and conquer the Russian countryside once again. RL

July 01, 2007

The Bug that Brought Russia to its Knees

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