Parachuting Cats to the Rescue
A true story
[Leader – Ask, “And what do you suppose would happen?” Wait for someone to suggest that it would itch and people would scratch / make the bites bleed.]
That’s right – those mosquito bites made them itch and scratch like mad. [Leader – Act out scratching and invites the children to do the same.]
The itching made them uncomfortable, but the real problem with the mosquitoes was that they carried a sickness called malaria. This meant that sometimes the people who got bitten by mosquitoes would get really sick or even die.
Scientists from an agency called the World Health Organization wanted to stop the people of
Everything seemed fine, but what the people didn’t know at first was that the mosquitoes weren’t the only insects that the DDT had killed. Some wasps died, too. These were parasitic wasps whose larvae ate caterpillars. Without the wasps there wasn’t balance in the ecosystem. Because they were not there to eat the caterpillars’ larvae, the caterpillar population began to grow and grow. More and more caterpillars were born and they were hungry. They ate and they ate and they ate.
The problem was, the people of
That’s right, the caterpillars ate holes in the thatched roofs and soon the roofs began to fall in. The people of
The wasps weren’t the only insects that ate the DDT. Cockroaches and other insects did, too. So, the cockroaches and other insects began to get sick. And these insects were the food for
And the geckos of
That’s right, the cats began to die. But even worse … [dramatic pause] the cats were important because they killed rats. When the cats died there wasn’t balance in the ecosystem. There were not enough cats to kill the rats. So the rat population of
The trouble with rats is that – just like mosquitoes – they often carry serious diseases which people can catch from them. Now the people of
The people of
[Leader – Use the sound instrument to signify that the story has ended.]
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
