"Wally, showherthetermites!" Victoria Tschinkel led me to where her husband was kneeling in a circle of sand marked with a bright pink ring. The bare patch in an otherwise grassy desert was one of several that Walter Tschinkel had doused with potent pesticide a few days before. "If termites play a role in killing the grass, then poisoning them should allow the vegetation to grow back," he says. He began scooping up handfuls of hot orange sand from around the roots of a dry clump of grass. Each scoop was followed by a silent pause as we scanned the dirt for near-invisible insects. When Tschinkel spotted movement, he dived like a hawk, aspirator to his lips, and sucked the termite up a plastic tube into a little glass vial. He would later examine his captives under UV light, looking for a telltale glow that indicated the insects had eaten the slow-acting poison.
展开▼
