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ABSTRACT: In 1916 state agricultural inspectors discovered Japanese beetles in a venerable nursery in Riverton, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. Until then the species had not been known to inhabit North America. The nursery disputed that the beetle posed a serious threat and denounced the Federal Horticultural Board, the agency assigned to address the problem. It convinced government entomologists in charge of eradicating the beetle that the nursery was too profitable to destroy. The population of beetles exploded into a plague that disrupted the region's agriculture, transportation and commerce and despoiled its landscape. It instigated heavy use of lead arsenate, which sickened people and contaminated soil. The Japanese beetle endures as a reminder of the battle fought against government authority over nurseries.
KEY WORDS: Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica, Federal Horticultural Board, Riverton, New Jersey, lead arsenate, insecticide, quarantine, embargo, Charles Lester Marlatt
Late in the summer of 1916, Edgar L. Dickerson and Harry BischoffWeiss, inspectors for the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, found an unfamiliar beetle on hawthorn in a nursery near Riverton in Burlington County, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Presuming the species to be a stray from the south, they collected a dozen specimens for later identification.
Over the succeeding months they were unable to determine the beetle's identity. They consulted Herbert Spencer Barber, coleopterist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., who reported the species to be a Japanese scarab-Popillia japonica, later known as the Japanese beetle-never before found inhabiting North America.
The initial infestation
Returning to the nursery the following summer, Dickerson and Weiss found the infested area "small" but the beetles extremely abundant, especially on weeds along one edge of the nursery for 200 yards. In places the infestation spread into nursery stock and a few feet into an orchard. The beetles riddled leaves and ate foliage of plants in at least nine taxonomic families.
Based on the beetle's distribution within the nursery, Dickerson and Weiss deduced that the nursery had introduced the beetle as grubs around the roots of iris it had imported from Japan six years earlier.
Translations of two entomological textbooks written in Japanese informed Dickerson and Weiss that the beetle in Japan was regarded as a pest of beans, grapes,...