Cyril Pemberton

Cyril Eugene Pemberton (born August 12, 1886, Los Angeles, California; died May 16, 1975, Diamond Head, Hawaii) was an American economic entomologist known for his work with sugar cane pests. He was the chief entomologist for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association during the interwar years and a leading researcher into biological control of insect pests in sugar cane. Pemberton was a driving force behind the introduction of the voracious cane toad from the Caribbean into Hawaii and Australia, where it became one of that continent’s worst invasive species.

Early life

Pemberton was born to parents descended from Canton, Missouri on a small citrus orchard in Los Angeles County at the height of the cottony cushion scale infestation.

When California’s citrus crops recovered, life became easier and Pemberton turned his attention to economic entomology. He graduated from James Lick High School in April 1906 – the month of the disastrous San Francisco earthquake and fire – and then went to Mission High School, San Francisco, where graduation was achieved in entomology in 1911 after Pemberton at first was interested in forestry and botany. Next, Pemberton obtained a position with the United States Department of Agriculture as Associate Entomologist two years later,[1] and moved to Waikiki, Hawaii.

Hawaii entomologist

After settling in Hawaii, Pemberton became a prolific worker on practical entomological problems in the archipelago, most especially the control of insect pests. Between 1913 and 1916 Pemberton began to work on control of the Mediterranean fruit fly, which was affecting orange crops in Hawaii.[2] Following a stint as a military sergeant during World War I, Pemberton then turned to insect vectors of bubonic plague in rats, and at the beginning of the 1920s imported several Australian wasps to pollinate fig trees which had been imported into Hawaii as a means of controlling erosion.

Since 1913, Pemberton had been a member of the extremely wealthy Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) and during the 1920s their wealth allowed their rising entomological star to undertake long trips to Australia, Southeast Asia and India in order to find predatory and parasitic insects to protect Hawaii’s cane and tropical fruit crops.[3] He was to spend the majority of his life during this decade in remote tropical rainforests until the Great Depression made it too costly for the HSPA to sponsor lengthy voyages by its leading entomologist.

Toad advocate

During the 1930s, the global sugar cane industry was hit not only by the economic crisis created by the Great Depression, but also by depredation of the cane itself by “white grubs” – various species of scarab beetles native to the lands upon which sugar cane had been planted on a larger and larger scale to meet increasing global demand in preceding decades.

The cane toad, native originally to mainland Central America and northern South America, had been gradually introduced to all non-Francophone Caribbean islands since the early nineteenth century, and depradations of cane by white grubs had led the toad to be released in Puerto Rico in the 1920s. At the height of the Depression in 1932, with falling sugar prices, Raquel Dexter read a landmark speech to the Fourth Congress of the International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists in San Juan, where she calculated that over half the insects eaten by the toad were harmful to crops and only seven percent beneficial.[4] Pemberton was so impressed by Dexter’s findings that he immediately captured over two thousand toads for release in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii, with the result that all the major Hawaiian Islands had had toads released by 1934.

At the same time, with the greyback and French’s beetles devastating Queensland’s sugar industry, Pemberton was able to convince the initially highly sceptical Arthur Bell and Reginald Mungomery that the cane toad should be released into Queensland.[5] Consequently, the toad was released into Queensland to disastrous effect due to mass toad poisonings of predators like quolls that had been allopatric with toads since the Jurassic.[6] Moreover, even in Hawaii where native predators evolved from species sympatric with toads for millions of years, the species failed to control pests in cane.[6] Despite this failure, Pemberton would keep a pet toad for sixteen years up to 1949[7] and would help spread the toad to Fiji, New Guinea, the Philippines and Micronesia.

Later years

Following his work introducing the cane toad, Pemberton turned to developing pest-resistant sugar cane, for which he would travel in his last major expedition to New Guinea, New Britain and New Ireland. Pemberton would attend the Sixth Congress of the International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists in New Orleans from October 20 to November 7 in 1938, but a major heel injury following service in World War II meant he could not undergo further expeditions after the war. Pemberton would formally retire from the HSPA at the age of sixty-five in 1951, but he retained a desk until 1966.

References

  1. ↑ Day, Arthur Grove; History Makers of Hawaii: A Biographical Directory; p. 104 ISBN 9780935180091
  2. ↑ Sawyer, Richard C. To Make a Spotless Orange: Biological Control in California, pp. 94-95 ISBN 1557532850
  3. ↑ Turvey, Nigel; Cane toads: A tale of sugar, politics and flawed science; pp. 87-88 ISBN 174332359X
  4. ↑ Lever, Christopher, The Cane Toad: The History and Ecology of a Successful Colonist, p. 93 ISBN 9781841030067
  5. ↑ Weber, Karl (editor); Cane Toads and Other Rogue Species: Participant Second Book Project; pp. 10-12 ISBN 158648706X
  6. 1 2 Turvey; Cane toads, pp. 6, 174
  7. ↑ Dodd, C. Kenneth; Frogs of the United States and Canada, 2-vol. Set, p. 190 ISBN
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