September 7, 2015
U.S.A.
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
Inside Boise’s battle with
the Japanese beetle
By Zach Kyle
Idaho Statesman
B
MISSING IN MALAYSIA. Harapan, a Sumatran rhino, enters his Wildlife Canyon at the Cincinnati Zoo and
Botanical Gardens, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Harapan, or “Harry,” the only Sumatran rhino in the Western Hemisphere
and one of three calves born at the Cincinnati Zoo, will soon be moved to Indonesia to breed at the Sumatran
Rhino Sanctuary. (Cara Owsley/The Cincinnati Enquirer via AP)
U.S. zoo to send endangered
rhino to Indonesia to mate
By Dan Sewell
The Associated Press
C
INCINNATI — A zoo that has the
last Sumatran rhino in the United
States has announced plans to
send him to Southeast Asia on a mission to
mate and help preserve his critically
endangered species.
Conservation experts at the Cincinnati
Zoo say eight-year-old Harapan could be
on his way soon to Indonesia, where nearly
all of the estimated 100 remaining
Sumatran rhinos live. Numbers of the
two-horned descendants of Ice Age woolly
rhinos have fallen by some 90 percent
since the mid-1980s as development of
their Southeast Asia forest habitat and
poachers seeking their prized horns took
their toll.
Cincinnati’s zoo has been a pioneer in
breeding the species, also called “hairy
rhinos,” producing the first three born in
captivity in modern times. Harapan will
join the eldest, Andalas, who has been in
Indonesia since 2007 and has produced
one male offspring. Andalas turns 14 this
month.
Roth said final details and permits are
still being worked out so the transfer
timetable is uncertain. It’s expected
Harapan will be flown to Jakarta, then
taken by ferry to his ancestral island home
of Sumatra.
Bambang Dahono Adji, director of
biodiversity conservation at Indonesia’s
Ministry of Environment and Forestry,
said preparations are underway at a rhino
sanctuary at Way Kambas National Park
in southern Sumatra, and hopefully
Harapan will arrive by early October at
the latest.
Indonesia has said it does not want to be
Arnold A. Lim
December 24, 1972 - September 11, 2001
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You are forever in our thoughts
dependent on other countries in conserva-
tion efforts by sending rhinos to be bred
abroad. However, it says it welcomes any
technological or scientific assistance for
the Sumatran rhino breeding program.
Veteran zoo rhino keeper Paul Reinhart
will accompany Harapan. He and others
will work with the rhino, who already has
travelled across the U.S., to condition him
to being in a crate for the long flight.
Harapan and Andalas’s sister Suci died
from illness last year at the zoo, after the
Cincinnati conservationists had discussed
trying to mate the siblings in a desperation
move.
Dahono from Indonesia’s environment
and forestry ministry said Suci may have
died because her diet at the zoo contained
too much iron, and expressed concern that
Harapan could face the same fate.
“The conclusion of experts is that
Harapan has to be saved,” Dahono said.
“Therefore, we are insisting on getting
Harapan back to its original habitat here
rather than having it live alone there.”
“We don’t want to see anymore
premature deaths of rhinos,” he added.
“We don’t want Harapan to become a
second Suci.”
Harapan was brought back to
Cincinnati two years ago after being on
loan to the Los Angeles Zoo. He also spent
time in Florida’s White Oak conservation
center.
He will join Andalas at the Sumatran
Rhino Sanctuary, where he lives with
three females and his one male offspring,
born in 2012, on the Indonesia island. With
three Sumatran rhinos in a sanctuary in
Malaysia plus Harapan, there are only
nine in captivity globally. Some scientists
recently concluded that there are no more
Sumatran rhinos living in the wild in
Malaysia.
Conservationists
and
government
officials met in Singapore in 2013 for a
Sumatran Rhino Crisis Summit to discuss
increasing action to protect the species.
Environment ministry officials in South
Africa, home to most of the world’s
remaining rhinos overall, reported a total
of 393 rhino poachings through April, an
increase of more than 20 percent over the
same period in 2014. Rhino advocates
believe the losses are even higher.
South Africa has struggled to counter
poaching syndicates cashing in on high
demand for rhino horns in parts of Asia
where some people claim they have
medicinal
properties
for
treating
everything from hangovers to cancer.
Associated Press writer Ali Kotarumalos in
Jakarta, Indonesia contributed to this report.
OISE, Idaho (AP) — Paul Castro-
villo first started chasing the
Japanese beetle in third or fourth
grade in the mid-1960s, catching and
collecting them on rose bushes in his New
Jersey backyard along with butterflies and
whatever other bugs were around.
He researched them, learning about
their diet and life cycle. He occasionally
roasted one with his magnifying glass.
The Japanese beetle was not then the
top insect threat in Idaho, as it is today.
But it had already infested most of the
eastern quarter of the U.S., chewing
through grass, plants, and crops as its
population skyrocketed.
The metallic green beetles were not a
problem in Idaho until 2012, when 61 were
collected in traps set by the Idaho
Department of Agriculture, all in Boise’s
Warm Springs neighborhood. The state set
more traps and found more than 3,000
beetles the next summer.
Not wanting to become another New
Jersey, Idaho looked for a bug expert to
battle the beetles. They found Castrovillo,
who, among other jobs, had worked in the
research and development department of
Micron for 19 years after graduating from
the University of Idaho with a Ph.D. in
entomology in 1982.
He had the degrees for the job, as well as
experience collecting, identifying, and
archiving more than 30,000 specimens for
The College of Idaho’s natural history
museum in Caldwell. He did that on
weekends and vacation days over 20 years
as he set traps and swung butterfly nets.
Castrovillo told department officials he
had waited more than 30 years for such an
opportunity.
“I’ve been doing this out of sheer love,”
Castrovillo said. “If you’re looking for
somebody to do this as an 8-to-5 job. I’d love
to have it.”
Most kids go through a phase where they
take interest in the fantastic, often alien-
like bugs in their backyard, Castrovillo
said. “Every once in a while, you get a kid
like me, who 60 years later hasn’t grown
out of it.”
Castrovillo was always partial to moths
BOISE’S BEETLE BATTLE. Japanese beetles
are seen in the office of Paul Castrovillo in Boise, Ida-
ho. Castrovillo says the pest could become a problem
for farmers if it migrates out of Boise. (Katherine
Jones/Idaho Statesman via AP)
and butterflies, such as the ones pinned in
specimen boxes in his office. He still hopes
to find a rock crawler, a rare bug living in
cold, high-elevation habitats that some say
will die if exposed to the heat of a human
hand. But he remembered the Japanese
beetle well. “It’s kind of like seeing an old
friend,” he said.
Today, Castrovillo works near the
epicenter of the beetle outbreak in the
department’s office on Old Penitentiary
Road, off Warm Springs Avenue. Two
small boxes full of shiny specimens pinned
in neat rows decorate his desk. Maps of
Boise marking many of the 2,500 traps set
in the city decorate the walls.
Castrovillo and his team are in the third
year of applying pesticides to select public
and private properties in areas showing
the highest Japanese beetle concentra-
tions. The treatments, which take effect
after a year, have been successful,
knocking the beetle count to 329 across the
city this summer, on pace for a reduction of
72 percent from last summer and 91
percent since 2013.
The traps measure the presence and
density of Japanese beetle populations in
neighborhoods, but they don’t attract
enough to eradicate the pest.
The state budgeted $400,000 in each of
the past two years for the Japanese beetle
Continued on page 9
New to your neighborhood:
A love letter to African America
Continued from page 6
sharing our sorrows and joys, our brown
and black families will daily acquiesce to
institutionally conditioned ways of
reacting to each other. Institutional
avenues simply inadequate to carry all the
historical and cultural complexities each
of us owns. Miserably inadequate.
This is really bad, because these
racialized systems — America’s educa-
tional, financial, social, and law-enforce-
ment systems — have failed to com-
passionately integrate black and white
families. After 150 years of trying. After
Presidents Lincoln and Johnson and
Obama trying. You and me expecting these
staid institutions to conscientiously
integrate black and our many brown
ethnic streams into a shared American
mainstream, is only asking for more
heartbreak.
What we ask of you
The neighborhood and workfloor
relationships necessary for you and me to
circumvent these systems don’t exist yet.
Not here. In fact, the opposite is true. New
Americans quickly back away from black
and white America’s living history. From a
bitterness so rutted into this otherwise
blessed continent’s face, that not a lot of
Arabs or Asians, Pacific or Caribbean
islanders, Spanish- or Russian-speakers,
dare get near its edge. Cuts dark as
Martian canals. Scars clearly visible from
space.
So we better start here, suadara saudara
hitam manis (dear black brothers and
sisters). With this love letter, just between
us. Even better would be love less rushed,
but there’s a tectonic demographic shift
rocking our shared continent. The U.S.
treasury and misery squandered segre-
gating you, are small compared to what
we’ll all pay to contain immigrant
America’s school kids, our workers, our
voters, our prayers.
We best start now, blending dreamers
brought from our world over, with African-
America’s solid moral authority. We will
ask your enslaved ancestors to bless us
with their dignity. We will ask your civil-
rights elders to include us in their Sunday
mornings.
Once we’re properly introduced,
maybe our institutional leaders will feel
free to acknowledge immigrant America.
And maybe this will free up all that kind-
ness and creativity sequestered some-
where deep inside the North American
continent.
Please let us know your thoughts.
Please let us get to work.
Love,
Your new neighbor