C10


R


K Eids Ladybugs produce a foul-tasting fluid on their legs that makes them taste awful to predators. Ladybug, ladybug, don’t fly away


Help scientists track the insect’s decline by taking pictures


Y


our mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find ladybugs! About 20 years ago, research-


ers realized that the nine-spotted ladybug had not been seen for a while in New York state, where they were once common. Scientists wondered why. So John Losey, an entomologist, or bug scientist, started the Lost Ladybug Project and has been com- piling photographs of ladybugs found across the country for the past 10 years. Ladybugs are cute, little, red bugs,


but they also perform a really impor- tant job. They are what Losey calls “beneficial insects,” which eat bugs that would otherwise harm crops. In fact, if ladybugs and other insects we- ren’t such good eaters, U.S. farmers would have to spend much more than they usually do on pesticides, chem- icals that kill the bad bugs. “Without the ladybugs and benefi- cial insects out there, we wouldn’t be able to grow the crops we do now. If you did, you’d have to use so much more pesticides, so we’d have more pollution in the area,” Losey says. “In a lot of cases, there aren’t pesticide al- ternatives.” There are about 500 species of ladybugs in the United States, but only about 75 of those are what you think of as ladybugs: red bugs with black spots. Losey’s project focuses on three types of ladybugs that are native, meaning they’re from the


Help count the ladybugs


So, get out there and find those ladybugs! Walk down the street. Head to the park. Check out your back yard. Then take a picture of any ladybugs you find. Once you have done that, ask a grown-up if you can go to www. lostladybug.org and upload your photographs. The scientists want details, including where and when you found the ladybug, for how long you searched, and what the weather was like. Even if you don’t find any ladybugs, that’s helpful information, too.


ISTOCKPHOTO.COM Ladybugs are important because they eat other insects that harm crops.


United States: the nine-spotted, the two-spotted and the transverse lady- bug, which has a long stripe instead of a spot on its back. Losey is trying to figure out why


populations of these ladybugs are de- clining. Maybe something is making the ladybugs sick, maybe the foreign ladybugs are taking over or maybe the ladybugs have simply moved to


other places. It’s too early for Losey to know for sure. That’s why it helps him to get any ladybug photo. It gives him an idea of which species are where. It’s important, Losey says, that all the species survive because they eat dif- ferent bugs at different times. Losey and his staff have received


about 7,000 images of ladybugs repre- senting 40 different species from peo-


ple all over the country. His goal this summer is to get 100 photos of lady- bugs from every state and Washing- ton, D.C. So far, Maryland has sent 87 images, Virginia, 79, and the District, only 4! Colorado has sent in the most images at 1,517! To find ladybugs, look for them on higher vegetation in a meadow or on awildflower. Ladybugs also like milk- weed plants and roses. A good clue to tracking down a ladybug is a sticky plant. That’s because ladybugs eat aphids, which are insects that secrete a sticky sap onto leaves. But really, Losey says, ladybugs could be any- where during the summer. The good news is that Losey has re- ceived about 150 images of the three ladybugs that he is worried about. But he is still not sure why they are declining or how to stop it. What he does know, however, is the more data he can compile, the more he can learn.


Because of the photos, Losey says,


“We are starting to get some inkling of what is happening.” Mission (almost) accomplished. —Moira E. McLaughlin


JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST


Boy Scouts paraded in the District on Sunday.


Boy Scouts are prepared to celebrate 100 years


 The Boy Scouts of America is celebrating its 100th anniversary at the National Scout Jamboree. The 10-day camp-out and gath- ering of more than 46,000 Boy Scouts, leaders and volunteers began Monday at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, where they set up more than 18,000 tents and 3,600 kitchens. Scouts between the ages of 12 and 18 participate in the jamboree. Numerous anniversary events are scheduled throughout the jamboree. Among them is a cer- emony Tuesday re- leasing a new 44- cent stamp honor- ing scouting. The U.S. Postal Service called the group “famous for serv- ing others and helping their community.” Jeremy Biedny, a 15-year-old Boy Scout from Minnesota, will introduce the stamp with Postal Service officials. He developed a passion for stamp-collecting as a young scout after earning a stamp-collecting badge.


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TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010 JEF MALLETT


TODAY:Mostly Sunny


HIGH LOW 88 72


ILLUSTRATION BY MEAGHAN WALSH, 6, FAIRFAX STATION


TODAY’S NEWS


Do Afghan war documents carry Pentagon Papers’ weight? wikileaks from C1


and later to The Washington Post and other newspapers. “The parallels are very strong,” Ells- berg said in an interview Monday. “This is the largest unauthorized disclosure since the Pentagon Papers. In actual scale, it is much larger, and thanks to the Internet, it has moved [around the world] much faster.” Superficially, the two episodes do seem


related. In substance, however, the case may be weaker. Both certainly portrayed their wars in much grimmer terms than those in pow- er would publicly acknowledge. The Pen- tagon Papers were quickly seized on by those who questioned and opposed the war; a similar fate seems likely for the Af- ghan archive.


But there are important differences.


The key one is the nature of the docu- ments and the substance of what they re- veal. The Pentagon Papers were a com- plete, three-volume history of the war, a 7,000-page narrative spanning a 22-year period. They relied on some of the high- est-level documentation possible: White House memos, military reports, CIA and State Department cables. They disclosed official secrets, such as the covert bomb- ing of Laos and Cambodia, and outright lies, such as Lyndon Johnson’s plans to widen the war in 1964 despite an explicit campaign pledge to the contrary. By contrast, the Afghan documents — more than 91,000 in all — are a loosely related collection of material covering nearly six years (early 2004 through late 2009) that leaves out important context. Many of the documents are unedited, firsthand reports by military officials, some of which are routine after-action summaries. What’s revealing about the material may be what’s missing: classi- fied documents that could shed further light on some of the incidents described in the rawmaterial. “We . . . need to be a little bit sophisti-


cated about the nature of documents,” says Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Proj- ect on Government Secrecy. “The fact that something is written down and even classified does not make it necessarily in- teresting or true. Documents can mis-


lead as well as inform. The idea that this disclosure constitutes the true record, as opposed to everything we’ve learned up to now, is naive and ridiculous. These documents are one more collection of data points from which we have to as- semble an understanding of what has gone on.” A further distinction: No single mes-


sage has emerged from the Afghan docu- ments the way it did from the Pentagon Papers. On Monday, the New York Times em- phasized the duplicity of the Pakistan military and secret service and its in- volvement with the Taliban; the Guard- ian focused on reports of civilian atroci- ties; and Der Spiegel underscored how the German government has mischarac- terized the military situation in northern Afghanistan that involves German troops. The headlines from the publica- tion of the Pentagon Papers were more consistent: The administration had de- ceived the public about the war. “The reports I’m seeing make me feel


that this is not the Pentagon Papers,” says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which works with whistleblowers. “I think there’s an enormous difference between raw intelligence from the ground and high level analysis from inside the Penta- gon. Ninety-two thousand cables is so scattershot . . . that I don’t know what the specific message is.” Importantly, the Afghan documents


don’t specifically contradict official statements and administration policies, as the Pentagon Papers did. Some of what is disclosed is revelatory or embar- rassing — American forces with inade- quate equipment or resources, for exam- ple — but there are no fully formed con- clusions at odds with the Bush or Obama administration’s views of the war. Ellsberg argues, however, that the situ-


ations are parallel. “The conclusion you draw from the Pentagon Papers is the same one you can draw from these docu- ments,” he says. “Is there any reason to believe the future will be any different than the past? I’ll make the prediction that, when people go through all 92,000 pages, they will not find a good reason for our escalation in Afghanistan or any more reason why the commitment of the


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REDUX?Julian Assange, a Wikileaks proprietor, compared the leak of documents on the war in Afghanistan to the Pentagon Papers, on the Vietnam War.


next 30,000 troops and billions of dollars will be any better of an investment than the last $300 billion we spent there.” The 2010 leak differs, too, because its release was instantaneous and global.


Rather than publish by itself, Wikileaks maximized the impact of the disclosure by recruiting three mainstream news or- ganizations in three countries as its “partners.” It then placed a hard deadline


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on the release, notifying its partners that it intended to post the documents July 25, about one month after the publi- cations were first permitted to review them and prepare stories about them. The Times went with its story after it consulted with the White House, which didn’t seek to stop publication but re- quested that the newspaper urge Wiki- leaks to withhold “harmful” material. Contrast this to 1971, when the Nixon ad- ministration enjoined the New York Times from further publication after its first Pentagon Papers stories. Four days later, The Washington Post obtained its


ASSOCIATED PRESS


TRYING TIMES:Daniel Ellsberg speaks outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles during his 1973 trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the media.


“This is the largest unauthorized disclosure since the


Pentagon Papers.” — Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971


own copy of the papers and published stories before it, too, was enjoined. Ben Bradlee, The Post’s editor at the


time, says Nixon’s attempts to stop publi- cation gave the Pentagon Papers a much higher profile. “I think it gave it a signifi- cance it probably didn’t have,” Bradlee said Monday. “When you came down to it, the amount of information that would be really damaging was very limited.” Would Nixon’s legal team, led by Jus- tice Department attorney (and future Su- preme Court chief justice) William Rehn- quist, have been better off ignoring the whole thing? “You could argue that, and I would,” Bradlee says. “You’re on a sticky wicket if you’re trying to keep the truth out of the paper. Most of the stuff might have been embarrassing, or potentially embarrassing, but it wasn’t endangering national security or placing anyone’s life in jeopardy.”


farhip@washpost.com nakashimae@washpost.com


ONLINE DISCUSSION Join Paul Farhi at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/


liveonline to discuss this story and other aspects of popular culture.


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