The Laboratorium : From the We are Not Making This Up Department

As relayed by Kyle Niedzwicki, it appears that the Chinese are deploying an army of ducks in order to deal with locust infestations. Xinjiang province, China's Wild West, is suffering from a severe locust infestation, the combination of a similar infestation last year in neighboring Kazakhstan with severe man-made ecological problems (see The Flying Desert and To Kill a Sparrow for more details). Having discovered that an individual duck will consume up to 400 locusts a day, the Chinese have trained large hordes -- 700,000 large, in fact -- of ducks to associate the sound of a whistle with feeding time, where locusts are on the menu. Like everything ever done by China since the Revolution -- posters, dams, armies, social upheavals, and national causes -- the story is amazing for its sheer scale. Click on the link to see the picture, if nothing else. Readers of The House that Jack Built or attendees of any Passover seder will be on the lookout for the inevitable next phase, in which it becomes necessary to import large packs of wild dingoes to deal with the duck infestation. After the dingoes, mountain yaks, to be followed by ferrets, rhinoceri, the People's Liberation Army, and the Angel of Death.