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Information is lacking on the chemical ecology of asparagus, and knowledge about the effects of its volatile emissions on its associated early season pest species is completely absent. The current study aimed to (1) evaluate whether the asparagus miner responds to asparagus volatiles, (2) identify and compare the changes in asparagus host plant volatiles from mechanical and chewing damage by the black cutworm, a temporally co-occurring species with the asparagus miner, and (3) assess how asparagus volatiles affect asparagus miner populations in the field. Results indicated that asparagus miners were significantly attracted to healthy asparagus stems when compared to clean air. Damaged asparagus headspace volatiles were quantitatively and qualitatively different from healthy plants. Volatile baits elicited a range of responses, but their effects were inconsistent between sampling years and phenology-dependent. Overall, we demonstrated that the chemical ecology of asparagus may be altered by its pes...

Spread your tiny wings and fly away And take the snow back with you Where it came from on that day So, little snowbird, take me with you when you go. To that land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow --Gene MacClellan, "Snowbird," sung by Anne Murray Each fall, millions of geese, ducks, hawks, and cranes start a long migration from northern North America, heading for warmer locations in the South. A few months later, large numbers of human migrants from Canada and from the northern tier of American states prepare for their escape from the rigors of snow shoveling, sub-zero temperatures, and dark winter nights. Packing their golf clubs, swimming trunks, and suntan oil, they travel by car, recreational vehicle, and airplane to the southern United States and Mexico. These warmth-seeking seasonal migrants are often called "snowbirds." It is an odd term, since there is no such bird; despite the title of Anne Murray's famous song, the snowbird, ornithologically speaking, does not exist, though snow geese and snow buntings do migrate, and snowy owls move south to find food in the winter. Like many northerners' dream of winter and sun, the snowbird is a fantasy. But the seasonal mass movement of population from north to south is real enough, and is a phenomenon o f profound social, economic, and political importance. Canadians have mixed reactions to the snowbird phenomenon. When trapped in a long Canadian winter, the prospect of heading south for a month or more seems attractive to all but the most determined nationalist. At the same time, the annual migration sparks some jealousy among those left behind to shovel the snow, thaw out the cars, and tolerate the sub-zero temperatures. Montreal Gazette columnist Andy Nulman captured, tongue-in-cheek, the downside of the snowbird migrations: "It's mid-November. Listen closely. It's starting once again. That distinct sucking sound you hear is the whoosh of hundreds of thousands of Canadians--"snowbirds" they's called--making their annual southward migration for the winter... While we're stuck here pulling on woolies and putting on snow tires to navigate sand-strewn sidewalks and salted roads, snowbirds are squeezing spare tires into Speedos to navigate sandy beaches and saltwater waves down south. More than mere objects of ridicule, they's become extreme Enemies of the State." ' Snowbird Numbers and Destinations Like their avian counterparts, the human migrants tend to return seasonally to a small number of familiar locations: south Florida, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Phoenix and Tucson, the California desert, Baja California, and west-central Mexico. Subgroups, particularly from Canada, flock together: Ontario residents on the West Coast of Florida, Quebecois between Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale, Saskatchewan residents in Texas and Arizona. Although some rent apartments or purchase time-share units in resort condos, many concentrate in trailer parks or even in vast, quasi-legal temporary recreational vehicle settlements, like the one that springs up yearly near the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert. Quartzsite, Arizona, a small community of slightly over 2,100 people in the summertime, explodes to over a million in January, according to town authorities. This "community," larger than Phoenix, consists of block after block of mobile home parking lots, filled from November to March by snowbirds fleein g the ice, snow, and cold weather of the North. (2) Migration on this scale--and Quartzsite is only one of the towns swarmed by snowbirds--is unprecedented in North American history. The historic southward migration to the United States has expanded further south in recent years. Thousands of Canadians, joining an even larger number of Americans, have set their sights on Mexico, where the cost of spending the winter is reputedly cheaper than in the U. …

Introduction It has sometimes been asserted that the history of mining in North America represents a kind of pure democracy, in which mining law was created by the miners without intervention from lawyers or politicians, and particularly without the input, interference, or advice of corrupt Eastern lawmakers. The classic expression of this idea is the Turner thesis, made popular by the turn of the century historian Frederick Jackson Turner. In an address to the American Historical Association given in 1893, Turner posited that the American frontier, not Washington or England, was the source of American democracy.(1) The Turner thesis, that war-horse of American historiography, has been battered over the decades by scholars who have shown that the west was far less egalitarian and democratic than populist myth would have it. As Howard Lamar has pointed out, the rigidity of Turner's idea--that a chapter in American history had closed--made his thesis "useless as a guide for the present and future."(2) American historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick(3) have shown that the west was subject to much the same historical, economic, and political forces as the rest of the country. Yet because it contains so much that Americans would like to see in themselves, the thesis retains a seductiveness that makes it hard to ignore--if it is not true, it seems that it ought to be true. In Canada, on the other hand, a country that has had more frontier than the U.S.A., the idea that these regions have dominated Canadian political institutions (though they have at times influenced them) seems absurd. In this country the frontier populist myth is so faint that this particular historical horse has never left the starting gate. Yet if Turner was wrong, then Canada and the United States are not as different as some Canadian nationalists would prefer to believe. Despite the assaults on Turner, there are some episodes in American history that do seem to confirm his idea that the frontier was the wellspring of democracy. One of them is the early history of western mining, particularly mining law and regulations. A number of scholars working in the field of property rights have demonstrated that mining law in the western United States sprang from the experiences and the demands of the miners rather than being imposed by legislatures; its contractual nature was first established by the miners and only later codified into law. Despite what rugged individualists in northern Canada may claim, the region in this century has been heavily influenced and almost totally controlled by the central government. This is as true of mining as of any other facet of the northern experience. Except for a very brief and uncharacteristic episode, the history of mining north of sixty degrees has followed a very different pattern from the Turnerian ideal. Far from being the well-spring of democracy in this country, the northern mining districts have served as examples of a much different tradition. The Klondike gold rush in particular can best be understood not as a flowering of regional democracy, but in terms of one of the oldest and most traditional historiographical interpretations in English Canadian history--Donald Creighton's theory of metropolitanism. In 1937 Creighton published The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, an attempt to understand Canadian history through a study of the influence of the St. Lawrence valley over the rest of the country.(4) Even after sixty years his view of Canada's history remains powerful, proof that some historical ideas do not lose validity with age; from the fur trade to the Canadian Pacific Railway to the National Energy Policy, it is difficult to argue with his contention that the Toronto-Montreal core has shaped Canada in the light of its own commercial interests. Though Creighton did not decry this control, others did, particularly regional historians, and what Creighton called metropolitanism, others have called "internal colonialism. …