Are our friends growing paper bags? (If so, could some clever grafting set them up so they could grow the lunches right in the bags?)
Probably not.
Dr. Free-Ride: Ooh, I wish these snails would stop munching my delicate plants! I'd really have no problem with them if they ate the weeds instead.
Elder offspring: It's like the weeds are protecting themselves.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, by being tough or spiky or yucky tasting.
Elder offspring: Hey, I read about a snail called the wolf snail that eats other snails.
Dr. Free-Ride: Does it also eat tender garden plants?
Elder offspring: I think they just eat other snails. They live in the Southeast U.S. We should get some.
Dr. Free-Ride: Gosh, I don't know. When you introduce a new organism to an ecosystem, sometimes unpredictable things happen. I worry a little that a newly introduced carnivorous snail might end up eating some useful critter.
Elder offspring: Hmm.
Dr. Free-Ride: Or some creature might end up eating the wolf snails and get sick.
Elder offspring: Some creature might end up eating the wolf snails, think they're delicious, and breed and breed -- until there are too many of them!
Dr. Free-Ride: It's hard to know ahead of time what a new organism will do in an ecosystem, and sometimes it's hard to undo it if the effect isn't one you like.
Elder offspring: Oh. Like the snails that eat our garden now?
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, Uncle Fishy says the snails that are munching our tender plants are the descendants of culinary snails some guy from France brought out to California a long time ago to raise for escargot.
Elder offspring: And they escaped!
Dr. Free-Ride: I suppose that would make them "freedom molluscs".
While eating our dinner on the patio to escape the heat that had collected in the house during the day, the Free-Ride family noticed a multitude of ants trying to share the cooler temperatures and our dinner.
Elder offspring: We need something that would eat the ants but not our dinner.
Dr. Free-Ride: Giant anteaters!
Elder offspring: A nice ant-eating spider would work, too.
Dr. Free-Ride: Nah, we don't have that kind of time. The spider needs to get a web going first. Meanwhile, our food is getting anty.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: How about some nice pitcher plants?
Elder offspring: Or I could bring out the Venus flytrap.
Dr. Free-Ride: Those still depend on the ants getting to the traps or the pitchers. I think we need pest control that goes straight to the pest -- something that will hoover up the ants before they get to our dinner plates.
Elder offspring:
OK, but you know you're not going to be able to actually get giant anteaters for the back yard, right? Our ideas are more realistic.
The "paper bag tree" pictured at the top of the post is, of course, an apple tree whose apples were bagged early to present a physical barrier against incursions by coddling moth caterpillars. Early reports from the field indicate the bags to be more successful than the approach the Free-Ride family tried this year (banding the apple tree trunk with tanglefoot and hanging pheromone-baited sticky-traps in the branches).