Word: moncrieff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...British, whose Lord Chancellor sits on a woolsack and whose woollens clothe some of the world's better-tailored figures, have been doing some basic thinking about clothes moths. Last week Textile Expert R. W. Moncrieff told how clothes moths (Tineola bisselliella) got their depraved craving for wool, and how modern chemists are persuading them to let the stuff alone...
...their wild state, says Moncrieff in the current issue of Discovery, moths did not eat wool. Their larvae ate dead animals on which the females deposited their small white eggs. But as soon as man started to make woolen clothes, many thousands of years ago, some moths began to change their feeding habits. With a good deal of difficulty, says Moncrieff, they learned to digest wool, have not yet completely adapted themselves to their unnatural diet. Researchers have proved that moth larvae grow faster when fed on fish meal or casein, and that unless they get vitamin B they never...
Most moth repellents and mothproofing chemicals, says Moncrieff, are expensive, not very successful, and often wash out of the wool eventually. So wool-protecting chemists tried another, more subtle approach. Noting that even the best-adjusted moths can barely digest wool, they tried to make it completely indigestible...
...mechanically as the natural ones, so the wool is as strong. The links are also stronger chemically, and the moths' digestive juices cannot break them down. Moth larvae put on a diet of modified wool quickly starve to death, even though a few nutritious food stains are added. Moncrieff predicts that when all wool is modified in this way, clothes moths will have to return to their primitive diet...